You have a lot more control, there are fewer steps to get you to the almost perfect look and it is possible to write on with either a square end or with a round one. It is often very handy to shoot some video, even if it is just with your phone, of you writing out the words and temporarily drop that video in your comp to use as a timing guide

Fine-tune the speed of the write on to make it appear natural.

Find any place that parts of the letters are revealed before they should be because the stroke is too wide at that point and fix those problems with a mask with animated opacity or by adjusting the path a little bit.

Put the Trim Paths layer above the text layer and set it as a track matte.

Add Trim Paths to the Shape layer and animate the range selector to make the line start at the first character and end at the last.

Make sure that the stroke on the shape layer path completely covers all of the characters.

Add a shape layer with a stroke only and draw a path through the center of the characters using the minimum number of points possible to write over the text that follows the same path you would follow when using a pen but not lifting it off the paper.

Create and position all of the text you want to reveal on a single layer.

The easy way to create a text write on animation is to:

Make sure they know what they are talking about. Even setting up the original type layers was poorly demonstrated and did not use tools available that make alignment and positioning both accurate and simple.

The only thing that tutorial demonstrates is a way to kind of sorta get a write on effect to look kind of ok if you don't look very close and you don't care much about your final product. Inefficient and it leaves out a lot of critical steps. I'm trying to make this Smooth Text Animation in After Effects - After Effects Tutorial - Writing and Masking - YouTubeīut with a blocky font instead of cursive Though I don't know how accepted the answer on this and I don't think I'm using a shape layer.

Stroke text after effects