WotD: Chicken scratches
A doctor’s handwriting looks like chicken scratches.
This is a common belief in North America and perhaps around the world.
Ask any pharmacist if they can always understand the prescriptions written by a doctor, and they will undoubtedly tell you no.
Chicken scratches is a term used to refer to difficult or impossible-to-read handwriting.
I’ve never seen a Japanese person write chicken scratches.
When Japanese people sign their names by hand, their penmanship is beautiful.
The characters are clear and legible (able to be easily read).
On the other hand, some Westerners take great pride in having a completely illegible (not easily read) signature.
In the West, many people have signatures that look like chicken scratches.
Why is that?
When I was a child, just developing my signature, I was told to make it as illegible as possible so that it would be tough for someone to copy and illegally use it.
That is likely, not true and only served to give me a false sense of security.
Another possible reason signatures look like chicken scratches is that they’re written quickly.
Writing your name takes time.
If you sign your name dozens of times daily, you tend to speed up the process by scribbling instead of concentrating on your penmanship.
On the other hand, when people sign vital documents such as mortgages, birth documents or income tax forms, they probably take more time and write with care so that their signature is legible (easily read).
Doctors are extremely busy people who write their signatures many times a day.
This may explain why prescriptions look like chicken scratches from a chicken that walked in spilt ink.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 61.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.