Abstract:
Purpose: To compare handwriting legibility among professions. Methods: A convenience sample, stratified by gender, of 20 right-handed volunteers each from 7 occupations, rapidly wrote the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in <17 seconds. Legibility was scored by two methods. The number of malformed individual letters were visually judged by a single blinded investigator. Four investigators, blinded to subject characteristics, independently rated the global legibility of the writing samples on a 4-point scale: poor, fair, good, and excellent. Raters were tested with the kappa statistic. Characteristics and scores were compared using logit regression and post-hoc Wilcoxon rank-sum test. Scoring methods were compared by Spearman’s correlation. The study was powered to detect a difference of 25% across occupations. Results: Among 70 males and 70 females, with ages 18-64 years and 12-28 years of education, only education differed among groups. Legibility scores did not differ significantly by occupation, age or education. But legibility was significantly and consistently better in women.
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