Why Does Taylor Swift Hold Her Pen Like That?

Should we be concerned? We called up occupational therapists to find out.

There’s a scene in the music video for “Anti-Hero,” the lead single off Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights, where Swift is seen writing on a pad of paper. She’s taking notes as one of her alter-egos aggressively points to a chalkboard with the very Swift-ian principle “Everyone will betray you” written on it, so it’s easy to miss a tiny but strange detail on screen: the way student-Swift is holding her pen. The most commonly accepted way of holding a pen or pencil is with one’s thumb and index finger, but that’s not where Swift’s pen is: She’s holding it between her index and middle finger. It’s not an altogether polite question to pose in connection to such an accomplished writer, but seeing it, you might be tempted to ask, “Uh, has this woman ever held a pen before?”

She very much has held a pen before, of course. There have been dozens of pictures and videos of Swift holding pens and pencils taken throughout her career, and in a lot of them, she’s holding it in this same uncommon way. If you do a quick Google, you might be shocked to discover just how many photos there are out there of Swift signing autographs and writing lyrics with a pen between the “wrong” fingers, and you might get to wondering if actually you’re the weird one for never noticing. It’s something that certainly hasn’t escaped her biggest fans’ notice over the years, and they’ve created Reddit threads, Quora threads, and even memes on the topic: “Holding a pencil vs. holding a pencil (Taylor’s version),” goes one. And though the conservative website the Federalist chose to use Swift’s pen posture as an excuse to publish a blog post charmingly headlined “Taylor Swift Holds Her Pen Like an Absolute Psycho” (Excerpt: “How about instead of ‘f-cking the patriarchy’ we learn how to hold a writing utensil, mmmk?”), we decided that rather than rushing to judgment, we’d call up the experts, starting with one occupational therapist who’s taught children how to hold their pens and pencils.