Writing 154 Shakespeare Sonnets With My Left Hand
If millions of children can learn to write with their non-dominant hand, so can I. Shakespeare’s sonnets will suffice as practice material; they’re short, there’s a lot, and some of them are even worth a read.
Here is my handwriting from March, 17, 2026, the start of this project.
It’s slow, messy, and I have no control. My hand burns with exhaustion and spasms from overexerting unused muscles. I have 154 days to change that.
For your viewing pleasure, I’m using a drawing tablet and my vibe-coded writing reanimation tool (https://rescrawl.kylezhe.ng).
Gallery
At this point I stopped using lined "paper".
Methodology
For the WPM calculations, a word is 5 non-space characters, and pauses longer than 2 seconds are excluded from the total time.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s Sonnets from The Folger Shakespeare. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, Mar. 17, 2026. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/
*I naively referenced the Poetry Foundation website to write the first three sonnets, which has different punctuation. For consistency however, all text shown uses The Folger Shakespeare version.