The tricky middle: i, j, m, n, r, t, u
Okay. Fifteen lessons in, and today we're doing the letters that look the simplest and cause the most quiet frustration: i, j, m, n, r, t, u.
These are all built from the strokes you already know. Overturns, understands, straight lines. Nothing new to learn shape-wise. And that's exactly why people get sloppy on them. They look easy, so folks rush, and rushed letters in this group turn to mush fast, because so many of them are just repeated humps in a row. An n next to an n next to an m starts looking like a fence that fell over.
So let's slow down and take them one at a time.
i and j — the simplest and the most ignored
The lowercase i is a short upstroke-downstroke pair with a dot on top. Thin up, thick down, lift, dot. That's it. Where people go wrong is the dot. They plunk it down like a period, heavy and round. I want you to just tap it. Barely any pressure. It's a thin stroke, same as your upstrokes, not a punctuation mark.
The j is the same top half as the i, and then it drops into a descending loop, same motion as the loops from a few lessons back. Thin down into the loop, swing it out, come back up thin. The mistake here is rushing the transition where the straight stroke turns into the loop. Give yourself a tiny pause there, almost a hitch, so your hand knows to change direction on purpose instead of guessing.
n and m — the workhorses
The n is two overturns joined. The m is three. If your overturn is solid from lesson three, this is just... doing it again, and then again for the m. The trap is consistency. Your first hump looks great, your second one gets a little wider because your hand's already moving, and by the third hump of an m it's a different shape than the first one. Watch your guideline. Same height, same width, every time. I'd rather you draw one slow, matching hump than three fast mismatched ones.
t — almost a letter, plus a flag
The t starts like a lowercase l that stops short, doesn't go all the way up to ascender height, just partway. Then you add a small crossbar. People want to make the crossbar too big, like they're crossing out a word. Keep it short and keep it above the midline a touch, not dead center. A crossbar that's too long makes the letter look like it's wearing a hat that doesn't fit.
u — the deceptive one
The u looks like an n flipped, and mechanically it kind of is, but the transition at the bottom is a compound curve, not a sharp corner. If your u has a pointy bottom, you're stopping and restarting instead of flowing through it. Go back and drill the compound curve from lesson four for a few lines before you touch the u again. It'll save you time, not cost you time, even though it feels like backtracking.
r — the one I still don't love
And then there's r.
So this one, actually, I want to be honest about. I don't love the lowercase r. Two years in and it still doesn't feel natural under my hand the way a or o does. It's a short stroke up, a little hook to the side, then down. The hook part is where mine goes wrong more often than I'd like to admit, it either disappears entirely or it turns into a weird spike. If yours looks a little off today, you are in very good company, mine looked off yesterday too.
Where this gets real: the word "over"
I want to tell you about a sign I made for my son a while back. Daniel wanted "GAME OVER" lettered up fancy for a friend's birthday, and I said sure, thinking it'd take twenty minutes.
The word "over" nearly ended me. O, v, e, r, back to back, and the o-v transition and then that r right at the end just would not sit right. I did the whole word three separate times before I had one I could live with. And the thing is, I learned more from redoing that one word three times than I did from a whole chapter in one of my books, because it forced me to see exactly where my hand and my eye disagreed with each other. The r again. Always the r.
Practice for home
Grab your cheap pen, not the nice one, and do this in order:
- One full line of i's, focusing only on that light dot
- One full line of n's, checking each hump against the last
- One line of m's, same check, three humps instead of two
- One line of t's with a short crossbar
- One line of u's, going slow through that bottom curve
- One line of r's, and don't beat yourself up about it
Real caution here, nothing dramatic: if your hand starts cramping partway through, stop and shake it out. Tension in your wrist shows up in the letters before you even notice it in your hand, and pushing through a cramp just teaches your hand a stiff version of the stroke.
Before next time
Do those six letters a couple more times this week, and pay closest attention to whichever one gave you trouble today. Mine's still r. Yours might be different, and that's fine, just notice it.