How do you sign your name?

[Mad_Jack]

My job has us constantly signing things (sign the current job paperwork, sign up for OT, sign the new "Training" sheet that states they changed a typo in the previous one, put your initials in seventeen different spots on this page, etc...), and so I started wondering about how each of us signs our names...

So, how do you sign your name?
Is it neat and legible?
Is it all in Cursive? Block print? Some random combination of both? Are some letters connected and others not?
Do you add flourishes to your letters? Is it generic-looking, or can people that know you recognize it as yours just by the way you write it?
(If anyone mentions they dot their "i"'s with hearts, I'll be blocking you, lol)


For myself, I rarely sign anything the same way twice. The more I'm in a rush, the less legible it gets. Generally, the Capital letters are written in nice clear Cursive, but then the lowercase ones start out neat at the beginning of the name and eventually just train off into random squiggles by the end of it. Quite often when something requires me to sign it, I'll simply initial it instead, since I've been using a unique rune-like symbol as my initials (ST) since junior high -

...
I only ever make an effort to sign my name clearly when it's an important document like gov't stuff.

(On a side note, whenever I write a double "T" (words like kettle, etc.) I always write it as a pi symbol instead...)



Feel free to drift off into tangents about spelling and punctuation if you want as well.

 

[billd91]

My wife took my last name, Dunn, when we got married because it's easier to write D followed by a squiggle of bumps than it is to constantly write Kipling.

 

[jdrakeh]

Cursive. Somewhat legible.

 

[Arnie_Wan_Kenobi]

Cursive, you can make out the first two letters of first, middle initial, and first initial of last name. Everything else looks like a zig-zag. Initialing looks kinda like the mid-90s California Angels logo.

I write a lot of hall passes. It's gotta be fast.

 

[Artamo]

I would call it cursive but it’s really three or four legible cursive characters with flourishes and the rest are all BS.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I would call it cursive but it’s really three or four legible cursive characters with flourishes and the rest are all BS.

Exactly what I do, with the caveat that the scribble part is a consistent scribble, which is all a signature needs to be.

 

[aco175]

I recall seeing something about Arnold Palmer the golfer a while back. He would tell all the other golfers of today to take time and acknowledge the fans and give them each the 15 seconds since they are there to see you. He would also say to sign your name so they can read it and know who signed it.

I sign my name with a letter or two of block letters with the rest cursive. In the Army, I gotten in the habit of initializing with a little squiggle under them. I remember the lady in Basic that gave out military ID cards saying that I can sign it anyway I warned, but would need to do the same thing the rest of the time I was was in.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My legal signature is an illegible cursive scrawl. Only a few letters are even CLOSED to being identifiable by anyone but me. (And when I screw it up, nobody notices except me.)

But I discovered something interesting about it while writing it on digital signature capturing systems: it always has a particular cadence.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

My signature has always been more of a reproducable shape stored in my .muscle memory rather than legible script of any sort.

Over time the cursive letters morphed into a series of curvy shakes and elaborate loops.

Interestingly when I transitioned and changed my name to something completely different, I didn't even bother to adjust my signature to reflect a different name with twice as many letters.