You start writing a letter, a note, an idea in your agenda that has just occurred to you… but you do not think about how you are doing it. This task is performed unconsciously, without thinking about how you draw each letter and believing that most people do it just like you. Well, no, each person in the world, like in everything, and has a different trait.
Angled letters, round, margins, large or small size, crooked lines, cohesion between them… A host of features that say a lot about each one. A few days ago, an American artist opened the debate about how each person writes the grapheme X.
How do you do it?
Sixers Smasey drew this graphic that includes the eight different illustrations in which a person could write the two intertwined lines that form this letter. This distinguishes them with arrows and colors that differentiate the order and direction of each method.
While sharing the diagram on her Twitter account, the creator asked her followers what they preferred, and the apparently simple question made a splash in social media. For example, English speakers insisted that there is only one correct way to do it. Unfortunately, nobody seems to agree on what it is.
Also this is so interesting to me – which way do you draw an X? Colored line being the first stroke pic.twitter.com/a0WTl8WT7P
— sixers smasey (@SMASEY) January 20, 2019
“Also this is so interesting to me – which way do you draw an X?” The color line is always the first, numbers are included that show which line comes first and which second and the direction in which each line is made, from top to bottom. In just a couple of days, this tweet has gone viral and everyone proclaims in the comments how it should be done. The problem: there is no unanimous agreement.
Geographical Trend
After hundreds of replies, Sixers revealed later that she had noticed that Americans were more likely to perform it in the 7th and 8th forms while the British tended to do it in the 5th and 6th, a geographic tendency that is probably due to how it was taught to write to these people in their respective countries.
Even so, people continued to share their own preferred method and their thoughts on how to draw it correctly. Many argued that the style was due to whether the users were left-handed or right-handed while others claimed that the most logical reason was because of the way they were taught in school.
