A history of left-handed writing
From early in our lives, most of us will demonstrate what is known as ‘lateral preference’: the consistent use of one limb or sense organ to perform a task. While we tend to favour one hand over the other, we also have a foot, eye, and ear preference. Every ‘lefty’ will be familiar with the exasperation of living in a right-handed world – struggling with scissors or can openers – and when it comes to writing and drawing, when our use of one hand over the other becomes obvious at a very young age, only a small percentage of us lean towards the left. It seems that this is genetic, but researchers are still investigating exactly how and why this occurs.
There have been a few notable names of left-handed figures, including Barack Obama and seven other former US presidents. The author Lewis Carroll, Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens and
