Here are some tips for learning Quikscript.

Read the manual all the way through at least once

This will give you an overview of what you should be doing even if you don’t remember all the particulars the first time.

You’ll also get some great tips such as:

Always re-read after writing

You’ll make a lot of mistakes. Some of them will only be obvious once you’ve read back what you’ve just written.

A week later, read what you wrote again. A week should give you enough time to forget what you wrote so you don’t automatically correct the wrong letters to the sounds and meanings that you intended to write.

(This tip, among others, is in the top third of page 11 of the manual.)

Keep the manual handy

I find myself returning to the Manual quite frequently, if only to check whether a Senior Quikscript abbreviation exists.

Double- or even triple-space when you’re starting out

When I started out, I used college-ruled¹ paper and triple-spaced my letters.

• One whole line for Short letters.
• One whole line for the tall parts of Tall letters.
• One whole line for the deep parts of Deep letters.

This ensured that the current line’s Talls wouldn’t scribble over the previous line’s Deeps and render both unreadable. Eventually, after I became a bit better at reading, I stopped triple-spacing and now double- or single-space as my ruling and pen dictate.

One thing that’s very different about Quikscript is that it puts a lot of information in the tall parts of Talls and the deep parts of Deeps. In many cases, the only information about a letter available to you is in the Tall zone or the Deep zone. For example, when writing  in Senior Quikscript, the only thing that separates the  from a  is above the top of the Short line. If your Tall letters’ shapes are obscured by scribbles from the previous line’s Deep parts, then you might waste time trying to read  as “” and waste time wondering what you meant by it.

Because Quikscript has a lot more information contained in the shape of the Tall and Deep parts of Tall and Deep letters, I’m much more hesitant to write in such a way that Talls and Deeps get written over each other. In practical terms, this means I double-space whenever I’m using college-ruled paper, a non-fine-tipped-pen, or both.