Regarding arrogant teachers, I’ve heard an anecdote about Dirac: if anyone ever asked a question, he would pause for a moment thinking, find the relevant part o

Regarding arrogant teachers, I’ve heard an anecdote about Dirac: if anyone ever asked a question, he would pause for a moment thinking, find the relevant part of the lecture, and the repeat it word-for-word. I guess he didn’t get many questions. I’m often a bit surprised by the handwriting problems but here are some tips: 1. Just write things bigger. Paper is cheap. Ink is cheap. I never liked the lines getting in the way so I just wrote on printer paper. 2. People often talk about superscripts and subscripts but outside of random calculus exercises, superscripts are either only 2 or sometimes 3 (so make them look different), a few letters like a, b, ab, 2a, a + b, etc (not hard to differentiate), or can be inferred from position (eg they go a_0 + a_1x + a_2x^2 + ...). Subscripts are usually either positional, something simple like n, n+1, n+2 (easy to differentiate), or some subset of the letters i,j,k,l (give j a decent descender to differentiate it from i; make sure the dot and curve on the i are obvious, write an l like a \ell). Mostly, you get to choose the letters so you don’t need to worry about differentiating \xi^{x^t} from \zeta^{\chi^\tau} (a close case is a pair of substitutions x -> f(\xi), t -> g(\tau), but this isn’t so hard when you realise that the Greeks go together and the Latins go together so you don’t need to differentiate t from tau) 3. A few simple handwriting modifications can help a lot (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22989703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22989703). I found larger ascenders and descenders helped (but make sure you know what they are in Latin and Greek), especially for i vs j, g vs p vs q, a vs d, u vs y, f vs s, z vs 7. I also modify a rho to sit on the baseline and slant more than a p. Curves and bowls help eg to differentiate a gamma from a y, or a k from a K from a kappa (write k with a bowl, kappa a bit like an x a la \varkappa), an l from a i, or a nu/u/v. I found italics unhelpful. My normal handwriting is italic but I write mathematics with an upright italic. 4. It doesn’t really matter if your xi and zeta are ugly so long as they don’t look like eachother or anything else. I had a lecturer who didn’t like to draw or say xi, he called it squiggle and would read aloud “so d squiggle d t is ...” (also twiddle is a much better name for \sim than tilde)