I don’t even want to know what kind of men you’ve slept with.
Hah! That’s one of the reasons I stopped using most cursive capitals, too.
Come on! The tall looping part is the twig, and the lower part is the berries. You have to use your imagination a little.
Being that it’s a Tuesday morning, I decided to actually write everything out. Whee! My uppercase X is still fucked up.
Whatever makes you happy, dear.
I could never get the capitals F or T to look quite right.
The poll is just about done now.
It is done. A mere 5 day deadline? Just noticed it today.
My cursive was so horrid I switched back to printing just so my high-school teachers could have a prayer of reading what I wrote. I have mediocre (at best) dexterity in my fingertips, and in a way I’ve typically envied those who have the kind of precise motor control to be able to write and draw things in a wonderful and artistically pleasing fashion.
Yup. I learned the formal cursive alphabet with the weird-ass upper case in elementary school and I still remember them all, although I have ditched some of the more bizarre ones in my everyday writing. I still hang on to the ‘Z’ though. I like the cursive ‘Z’ in both cases.
I’m not following the logic. It’s not cursive because it’s cursive? Okay then, whatever.
Can do them all, yes.
I do some differently from how I was taught, and some others beyond that differently from how most OTHER folks who write in cursive do them, but I can do the variants as well.
Q: my capital Q looks like an O with a running bar coming through it from upper left to lower right & continuing on to the next letter. Was taught the version that looks like a “2”
G: my capital G looks like a lowercase script g writ large but I was taught the “General Mills” G with the little mouse ears on top.
J: my J is a lot more angular than what I was taught; mine has points top and bottom, but other than that it’s the same construct as the more rounded version
P: I do it as I was taught but many folks do a much “puffier” P with the outside rising line WAY off to the right of the original inside descender. Mine almost touch. And I use the little fillip thing at the top where I start.
R: See above for P.
T: I do it as I was taught but many folks do something that looks like a script capital F but without the crossbar. My capital T has a top bar added after the fact and it goes all the way arcross, not just to the left of the vertical bar like the capital-F derivative.
V: I make mine pointy at the bottom but was taught a rounded version.
W: likewise
X: I just make a large X, with the topleft-to-lowerright bar taller and a bit curvy. The “two mirror-image curls” version I was taught looks like shit when I do it so I don’t use it.
Yes, but I have been using most of them as mathematical symbols. In ordinary writing, I mostly don’t. Except in my signature, where I do use the old cursive caps.
I’ve forgotten many of the capitals
I still hand-wrote a fair amount in high school (I’m 28 now), and even into college (damn you, blue book exams) and I always wrote in cursive. It is, after all, faster - which matters a lot when you need to fill like three blue books full of essay answers.
But back in high school, as a conceit, I started writing capital letters in print, the rest of the word in cursive. I still think this looks better. But as a result I’ve forgotten many of the cursive capitals.
…I still think the cursive capital A,E,F,G,S and T are hideous.
Sure, but from people saying things like they had to in 3rd or 5th grade, I might have a lot more practice at it than a lot of you. I bet no one else when to public middle and high schools that required you use cursive instead of printing for all classwork (expect math class, obviously.) It was nice to get to college and be able to print instead!
Well, there are two ways to write Latin letters, right? Print and cursive. Cursive is often seen as sort of fancy and old-fashioned, to the extent that it’s often not even taught anymore. That’s why there’s this poll - it’s becoming an outdated skill, one worth taking note of.
But the Arabic alphabet only has one version, with the letters hooked together (usually - some letters have to be unhooked). So it’s not a noteworthy skill. It ALWAYS looks like that. It doesn’t really belong in this thread because that’s the only way to write it. (And really, maybe Cyrillic doesn’t either because while a print version does exist, no one actually writes with it, it’s just used in printed stuff like books and newspapers. Well, and I used to write with it because my attempts at Cyrillic cursive were failtastic and although my version looked weird it was at least legible. But now I’ve been taught properly and my Cyrillic handwriting is all pretty.)
On the other side, Hebrew does not have a cursive version. The letters are always separated.
Capital F was always one of my favorite letters to write.
My high school didn’t require it, but my grade school (up to eighth grade) did.
I was taught the formal cursive script (Palmer?), but after we learned it, we were never really drilled on it as long as our handwriting was legible. Like most people, I quickly found a middle ground between Palmer and just printing. I get compliments on my handwriting from time to time (which is an ego boost for someone who spends his life in front of a computer keyboard) and I dabble in calligraphy.
I think there’s a problem with conflating cursive writing (a.k.a. handwriting, joined-up writing, longhand, not printing) with the fussy variety often taught, which is simply one kind of cursive. I would venture to suppose that cursive writing is very prevalent, simply because it’s faster than printing everything; so people, especially those who take a lot of notes, evolve a natural, cursive script that works for them.
Did you actually look at the examples given in that entry? The letters are still separated. They don’t join up. I’ve never heard that style of writing called “cursive Hebrew” it’s just regular print. It’s how everyone (except Torah scribes, I guess) writes Hebrew by hand.
But the fussy type is what we’re talking about in this thread, right? The proper type we were taught in school and that no one actually uses because writing a Q as a stylized 2 is really weird?
The main Wikipedia page for cursive defines it thus: “Cursive is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic writing systems, the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke.” M-W gives cursive as “flowing often with the strokes of successive characters joined and the angles rounded”–note that it does not require that letters be joined. You seem to be qualifying the form of cursive used in English (i.e., joined letters) as the exclusive definition, which it’s not.
Yes.
If I need to make a capital Q - which is rare, I do use the proper form. Same goes for the capital Z (which is actually my favorite cursive letter).
I also taught my nephew how to use proper cursive over summer vacation one year. Of course, as soon as he went back to school, he used it just long enough to surprise his teacher. Then he promptly went back to scribbling.
The receptionist at the office where my mom went for counseling actually taught me best. She also was the one who taught me the alphabet, how to print, and my beginning reading skills. Thanks to her, I was able to write cursive by first grade.
I have made my own adjustments when writing cursive but I find myself using the proper form anyway more often than not.