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show/hide this revision's text 4 Added link to a demo video

Suggestion number one:

Learn Calligraphy! It's a lot of fun and does mean that you can write the fonts in genuinely nice ways. Books on calligraphy tend to have detailed instructions on how to do at least the basic alphabets: explaining which stroke to do first, and how to hold the pen. Although not all of it transfers to the blackboard, it helps a lot. For example, once you seen how the different "g"s are written, you'll know how to write the Lie algebra symbol correctly. However, I do find that a script S ($\mathcal{S}$ is not even close) can take me a couple of goes to make it look right - it shouldn't be pointy at the top but should sweap backwards.

(Note: to anyone reading the comments, I originally had this answer together with my other answer in the same post. Given the comments, I decided to split them.)

Following up on aleksander's comment to the original question, I had a go at doing a video of how to draw a fraktur g (𝔤) (well, actually it's gothic but if you know the difference you don't need this video, and the gothic g is probably more distinguishable from a normal g than a fraktur one on a blackboard). It's not very polished, but you can see what it looks like here. It was quite fun to do so if this would be helpful, I can easily do more.

show/hide this revision's text 3 Explanation of previous edit for the record

Suggestion number one:

Learn Calligraphy! It's a lot of fun and does mean that you can write the fonts in genuinely nice ways. Books on calligraphy tend to have detailed instructions on how to do at least the basic alphabets: explaining which stroke to do first, and how to hold the pen. Although not all of it transfers to the blackboard, it helps a lot. For example, once you seen how the different "g"s are written, you'll know how to write the Lie algebra symbol correctly. However, I do find that a script S ($\mathcal{S}$ is not even close) can take me a couple of goes to make it look right - it shouldn't be pointy at the top but should sweap backwards.

(Note: to anyone reading the comments, I originally had this answer together with my other answer in the same post. Given the comments, I decided to split them.)

show/hide this revision's text 2 Split suggestions into two answers for better discrimination

Two suggestions

Suggestion number one:

Learn Calligraphy! It's a lot of fun and does mean that you can write the fonts in genuinely nice ways. Books on calligraphy tend to have detailed instructions on how to do at least the basic alphabets: explaining which stroke to do first, and how to hold the pen. Although not all of it transfers to the blackboard, it helps a lot. For example, once you seen how the different "g"s are written, you'll know how to write the Lie algebra symbol correctly. However, I do find that a script S ($\mathcal{S}$ is not even close) can take me a couple of goes to make it look right - it shouldn't be pointy at the top but should sweap backwards.

  • Get rid of the blackboard. The way to guarantee that the fonts look right is to have a computer display them (either by directly projecting or by printing out slides first). This also means that you can use colour and other fun things.

    To forestall the deluge of "How can you suggest getting rid of blackboards?" posts, all I'll say is that I think that I give better lectures and seminars when I use a computer than when I use a blackboard. The difference is probably more in the way that using a computer forces me to prepare it than in the method of delivery, but it works for me.

  • show/hide this revision's text 1