My signature is in no way readable; it might have been years ago, but now it is my personal scribble that I use to mark my approval of documents. Any mark you make that you call your signature is your signature.
This is how it works for me. Voting and bank records show my signature is an unreadable but consistent scrawl over many years.
I’m glad you posted this, because throughout this whole thread, I was thinking “Is cursive joined-up handwriting? It sounds like it, if they’re comparing it to printed letters. But I can’t see a whole thread of bright adults having trouble writing with joined-up handwriting…” and was very confused.
So cursive is a specific type of joined-up handwriting, where the letters are supposed to be formed in a particular way? Is there a specific American way of handwriting, then? I don’t know many Americans, but I hadn’t noticed the few I do know writing the same way - it’s not something I’d normally pay much attention to though.
You learn something new every day, and this is clearly my thing for today!
There’s several different methods. I was taught The Palmer Method. Zaner-Bloser is another one, as well as D’Nealian cursive.
I’m not sure what’s odd about it. Looking at old British manuscripts, the letterforms for handwritten letters looked different than printed letters. I mean, look at Dickens, for instance. See the “G” in “Marley’s Ghost” at the top of the page? That’s the type of “G” we’re taught in cursive. Also note stuff like the lowercase "f"s with the lower loops, the lowercase “l” that is a loop, the lowercase “s” that looks nothing like its printed counterpart, etc.
When I’m taking down a phone message or writing a grocery list I use a hybrid with some notable inconsistencies.
My hobby is letter writing, and for that I use cursive.
Last summer my son was to be away for 11 weeks. I determined I would send him a letter a week. After the first or second one he asked that I stop writing in cursive because it’s too hard for him to read (he’s in high school). He learned cursive in second and/or third grade but hasn’t ever been required to use it for school work.
When his grandmother, who is a retired grade school teacher and has lovely handwriting, writes to him I have to read him her letters.
Would anyone really be affected if it were to disappear? I’d be sad, but it would pass.
This is basically me, except that my cursive is still pretty legible. At least my signature is — I can’t actually remember the last time I wrote anything else in cursive. Once I learned drafting-style block lettering, it became my standard method of writing things by hand. All capital letters, simply making the letters a bit bigger for “actual” capital letters.
I do remember one odd feature of my cursive. Once I was no longer being graded on forming my letters the “required” way, I completely stopped using the cursive forms of the capital G, Q, and Z. I thought the cursive forms of those letters looked stupid and had no apparent relation to their printed counterparts, so I always printed them. Strangely, I never had an issue with the cursive capital S, or any of the lowercase cursive letters that did not resemble their printed counterparts.
I’m 47, so I probably learned cursive around 1974-75, and had mostly abandoned it by the early 1990s.
As others have said, Palmer Method cursive isn’t taught in the UK. Our primary schools teach this style of handwriting, which is pretty similar to print (capital letters aren’t shown in the link, but they are simple print shapes and aren’t joined to the rest of the word).
Obviously, the style looks very childish, and no adult writes like that. In my experience, schools don’t force you to do “joined-up writing” after age 9 or so, and many people will never use it again after that age.
(IIRC, in the US you’re required to write your SATs in cursive, yes? In the UK, the exam boards don’t give a hoot about how you choose to write.)
My day-to-day handwriting is mostly printed, with a few letters joined here and there. But for special occasions I can write in a copperplate style, and I don’t have any problems in reading cursive styles.
My everyday scrawl is a combination. Like a serious mess of whatever fits easiest in the word. Random small capital ‘R’ after a lowercase perfect cursive ‘y’? Sure, if it flows right.
I also use a combination of cursive ‘styles’. I taught myself cursive before it was required for school. Using Palmer method books. In school we were taught D’nealian script. A few rounds of learning calligraphy styles later and loving the look of ‘old’ writing… Yeah. My handwroting is a free for all. AND I LIKE IT THAT WAY!
I can write in straight cursive, straight print, block, etc. I lose speed doing it that way though, so unless uniformity is majorly important, I don’t.
And yes, I can read cursive.
I also have a 7 year old that I’m trying to get to decide he wants to learn to write pretty ways. He’s not interested so far though.
I don’t think cursive is VITAL or all important. But if you learn it ‘right’ as an alternate way of writing instead of as a whole separate alphabet, I don’t see why you shouldn’t learn or teach it. We lose enough ‘useless’ skills as is, why add more, ya know?
In New Zealand, we were taught an alphabet rather like JoinItC17 but with loops on uprights of letters such as b, d, h, k, l. The capitals are similar to the Palmer method ones.
I can still read cursive and write it about as well as I print, but tend to use block writing. I learnt it about 50 years ago, and have no idea if it’s still taught in NZ schools.
I realized pretty early on in college that my cursive handwriting was both faster and more legible than my printing, so I used cursive for all my notes. I still use it if I’m taking extensive notes in a meeting, although for brief notes I’ll use printing. I work in a field that uses a lot of acronyms (I guess most fields do, really) and will use print for that too – a string of capital cursive letters is harder to write and read in cursive.
Looking at some pictures online, I believe I was taught Palmer cursive. I always hated the capital Z in that style, which looks way too much like a Y or even a Q, and at some point developed my own cursive Z that is basically just a curlier print Z. Otherwise my cursive writing remains pretty Palmer-y looking. I actually wish I’d learned D’Nealian though, as the capital letters in that style lack some of the curls and serifs used in Palmer style.
Did he actually get his non-cursive signature rejected or did he just freeze and assume it had to be a super-special form of writing as sold to elementary schools?
D’Nealian cursive comes with a special form of “printing” too. The letters have little tails on them that will graduate into cursive connections eventually, and a few of the letters are a little different from how I usually see people “print.” The theory is that it’s easier to turn into cursive, although as I said in the other thread I think the main purpose is to liberate even more cash from schools.
AFAIK it’s just the page you copy promising that you definitely didn’t cheat. And I don’t believe anything bad actually happens if you just write it however you please, so long as you write it. (I can’t find anything authoritative, but there are dozens of discussions online where anxious test takers freak out over losing their entire futures because of a lack of proficiency in cursive, and they all have dozens of responses from people saying to chill out because nobody actually cares. Not one has anyone claiming to have had their test rejected because of a failure to use proper cursive.)
I used to prefer “printing” (odd term, that, for a form of handwriting as opposed to letterpress, but never mind), but when I was in college I developed it into a pretty, graceful, flowing sort of hand that was as elegant as good cursive, and I could write it pretty fast, too. For many years, that was how I wrote everything. But a few years ago, I returned to cursive and now I prefer that as a rule. I still write it neatly and legibly after all these years. Good handwriting has always been important to me. Even my Arabic handwriting is based on calligraphic style rather than the usual scrawls.
Teachers in middle school thought my handwriting was painful to read. When I switched to block printing in ~10th grade, complaints ceased. After high school, fellow students liked to Xerox my notes in classes that they missed. Now I write in maybe a 70/30 print/script hybrid.
I don’t think cursive is appreciably faster. I think it was first taught because it looks better if you’re using a fountain pen: print will produce a splotch every time pen is initially placed on paper. Once ball points came into widespread use cursive lost its true purpose, except possibly for signatures. IMHO.
I have to make this plain for a people that did not have to read and write cursive all the time. Cursive has never been something you could always read well. It requires that you read someone’s handwriting for a while to be able to reliably read it. You can not read 100 letters from strangers and understand all the words in all the letters. Deduction from context and having others try can help, but you won’t understand all the words in a hundred letters from strangers. There is a very good reason to have the secretary type up the letter before posting it.
Well, I can write in cursive as well as I could in school, which was far less legible than print, yet still considered “satisfactory.” And what’s worse is that my OCD tendencies meant I spent a lot of time on it in the early years. (Handwriting was the only thing I wouldn’t get an A in.) I can also read it just fine, as long as the handwriting is fairly good.
I accidentally voted that I couldn’t write well, because I misread and thought it said that I didn’t use it often.
I’ve always been perfectly capable of writing in cursive. The irony is that I can write in print lettering faster than cursive, so that is what I prefer. Honestly, I was surprised my daughter was taught cursive in school, and will be even more surprised if my son is. Writing period seems on the way out, sometimes. Cursive just seems like a"fun, old-timey" type thing to be taught nowadays.
In eight grade my science teacher (also the principal) said my cursive handwriting was atrocious and to just print from then on. My grades improved, and I was surprised that a teacher wanted clarity, not adherence to the rules that we had to write in cursive all the time.
The thing about my printing is I can write much smaller, so my notes became very condensed. When we were told we could have a single sheet of paper for crib notes for a test, I had the entire notes from the entire semester in front of me.
Cursive is for writing journal entries and rough drafts of letters. Things that I need to get out fast and only I will probably read. Printing is for stuff that other people actually need to decipher.
***Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The fastest, clearest handwriters join only some letters: making the easiest joins, skipping others, using print-like forms of letters whose cursive and printed forms disagree. (Sources below.)
Reading cursive matters, but even children can be taught to read writing that they are not taught to produce. Reading cursive can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds, once they read ordinary print. Why not teach children to read cursive, along with teaching other vital skills, including a handwriting style typical of effective handwriters?
Adults increasingly abandon cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority, 55 percent, wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive. When most handwriting teachers shun cursive, why mandate it?
Cursive’s cheerleaders sometimes allege that cursive makes you smarter, makes you graceful, or confers other blessings no more prevalent among cursive users than elsewhere. Some claim research support, citing studies that consistently prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant. Advantages claimed for cursive are cited from research that finds them in ALL handwritings — not just in one style,
What about signatures? In state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
All writing, not just cursive, is individual — just as all writing involves fine motor skills. That is why, six months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from print-writing on unsigned work) which student produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May - June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September - October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
[AUTHOR BIO: Kate Gladstone is the founder of Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works and the director of the World Handwriting Contest]
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com***
Nice post, Kate. Probably could have used you in my “I forgot to write!” thread. 
4 posts in 5 years, 2 of them about handwriting. Please stay this time! 