Any lefties here? I'm a lefty and feel stuck with the basic ballpoint because any other pen I try ends up with everything smudged. Not sure if that's just poor form on my part.
I'm a lefty, and I can barely get pens to work most of the time because of the angle I have to hold the pen to write with (lefties tend to push pens, which makes them not work). Pencils weren't much better because of the smudgy mess it created all over my hand and the paper. Getting through school was excruciating and messy until I got to college and it was considered "okay" to turn in work I had done on my computer.
I could have pretty decent handwriting for about an hour and then fatigue simply set it and most of my writing is an illegible mess. Not surprisingly, when I was young and we were graded on handwriting my grades were pretty poor.
Cursive didn't help much either as the continuous strokes simply meant I made more of a mess all over myself.
I was an okay sketch artist as a kid, so I had good pen control, just could never really adapt myself to the written word.
Lots of lefties go through all kinds of contortions to improve some of the situation, you'll notice Obama reaches around where he's writing so he can pull on the pen. I tried that for a while but the back and shoulder cramps were pretty spectacularly killer.
I'm also left handed and have tried out way too many pens. As others have suggested, Uniball Jetstream pens are fantastic and are nearly impossible to smudge by accident. They also come in a variety of sizes. I really like the 0.38mm for taking notes on the small margins of academic papers.
The main pens I've been using these days are disposable fountain pens [1]. They write great and somehow the ink rarely smudges, though more often than with the Jetstreams. But overall I find it more pleasant to write with fountain pens.
I switched to Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens a year or so ago for daily use and will never go back to a ball point pen ever again. I also switched to vertical writing a when I was very young. I could never get comfortable writing with my wrist all twisted over the top like the teachers wanted me to do. So my note pads all sit with the lines vertical and I write up.
Even worse, for my own personal note books and random writing I use steno pads and write from the bottom to the top of a page. My wife hates it because when I ask her to read something I've been working on she has a lot of trouble reading it. But I've been doing it for so long it's natural for me. If I need to share something with people I can write "normally" or type it out. But personal use my system works for me.
Lefty, grew up in France (= forced to use a fountain pen from 1st to 12th grade), I just learned how to write in a way that minimizes smudges (my 2nd grade teacher would tear apart any piece of work with smudges on it and make you redo it, that's French education for you), plus heavily use blotting paper.
Now I work for a big tech company and still carry a notebook + fountain pen + blotting paper to meetings, it amuses my coworkers.
I have always wondered if right-handed people who write with right-to-left scripts (Arabic or Hebrew spring to mind) face the same struggles that lefties who who write the Latin alphabet face. Arabic calligraphy in particular, has managed to reach a high degree of refinement despite the risk of smudging.
If so, there must be a lot of products and techniques to accommodate their needs, which could help you.
The only way I've successfully used a fountain pen for any length of time as a lefty was to write right to left with it. As with a right handed script you're drawing away from the finished script so you don't smudge it, but your angle and letters are "wrong" (until you get used to them that way). When I was in high school I read that Leanardo DaVinci wrote "backwards" in his notebooks[1] because it was more comfortable for him as a left handed writer, which of course as a nerd I had to try :-).
I'm a lefty and I switched successfully to Mitsubishi Jetstream pens a few years ago. They don't smudge unless you're writing on glossy paper. I bought mine at a Japanese stationery/pen shop in SF (at the mall next to Union Square) a few years ago, but you can find them anywhere. Here's a Rakuten link: http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/atn/item/sxn-15005/
Yep, have similar problems with ballpoints and soft-leaded pencil.
At the moment I am mostly using Artline 200 Fine 0.4mm pens. These are not ballpoints and the think ink lines dry fast, so the text is hard to smudge. They are not without issue though. As the nibs are only crimped into place and writing with your left hand means you are pushing down and to the right; the nibs slowly get pushed up into the pen body. So I have to replace them when the nib disappears which is before the ink runs out.
If I am forced to use ballpoints for any lengthy text I end up rotating the paper close to 90 degrees and writing at an extreme angle to get the pen to drag rather than push across the page.
I took a calligraphy workshop, and since I'm a lefty, I ended up having to hold the paper with the top edge to my right and write vertically down the page. That way, the letters came out looking correct and I didn't smudge the paper.
See Noodler's "Ben Bernanke" inks[1] which are fast drying and meant for lefties. The name is a play on the fast drying inks Bernanke is using to print more money.
