Well…
We got taught something very similar to the US-style that you linked to. A few of the capital letters were different, and the “d” had a loop on the stem, but what I was taught in primary school looks a lot closer to the US style than the one you linked to previously.
(I’m only 23, too, and both my younger sisters were taught the same way.)
Looks like American/Australian/Canadian/Kiwi/Jamaican/etc. writing to me. Almost no American adults write in D’Nealian Cursive (bottom of this link).
I’ve done this - completely spelled my own name wrong in my signature. It’s one of those things I’ve done so often, that if I think about it too hard my mind goes blank and I’m unable to do it naturally, so end up making a pig’s ear out of it; such as spelling it wrong.
That’s what I was taught in the early 50s in the US. The lower case letters aren’t bad, but I jettisoned most of the caps forms as soon as I got into a grade where the content was more important than the shapes. So I use more “italic” forms for D, G, Q, L, Z, and the like.
However, for a number of years I was the office manager for a used diesel truck and equipment yard, and I had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles at least once a week with paperwork for transferring titles. The DMV required that all handwritten forms use the traditional cursive capitals for the Vehicle Identification Number, which usually had somewhere between 8 and 10 letters interspersed among the digits. It was a royal pain in the ass to try to get my fingers to produce acceptable versions of Q, J, D, W, L, and Z.
But signatures don’t really “match” and if they do, isn’t that indicative of a forgery?
Besides that, if I have a couple of things in front of me to sign, the last signature often looks very different from the first one as I don’t really have a signature (it’s a cursive J followed by an indecipherable scribble). I’ve never gotten any grief for it and I doubt I’m alone.
I wish that I did not have to sign in a “socially acceptable” way…
Mine is just a squiggle with some dots because I was too lazy as a kid to write out my whole name, and could never see the point of having an elaborate signature.
I could copy signatures of most of the people I knew quite well, and having a complicated one seemed like a waste of effort that could easily be circumvented.
This seems to bug everyone around me to no end. Banks, credit card companies, passport guys, all ask “Thats it?” when they see my signature. Good that I rarely have to sign anything these days and instead use my japanese name stamp.
Recently I took the GRE test and they had this long statement that you had to copy in cursive. . . Man, that was such a mess.
Once, in NYC, I was depositing a check, and happened to get a newbie bank teller. She was being very conscientious, and rejected my signature. Apparently I had left out a few letters, and it wasn’t legible enough for her. I pointed out to her that I had been signing my name like that consistently for a few decades. She insisted that I re-sign my name, making all the letters correctly. I asked to speak with her supervisor, who of course accepted my signature.
That’s not a real electronic signature. A real electronic signature uses cryptography is fancy ways to prove your identity.
It’s not about the exact match. Obviously noone writes the EXACT same signature every time. To a handwriting analyst though, its the small writing “ticks” that can show that its someone’s signature. A signature is generally done as one “movement” which has been learned in muscle memory. A handwriting analyst would be able to tell those little ticks that stay the same from signature to signature, like the pen motion for any loops or funky mannerisms of your signature.
The “new” version of the SAT (my year was the first to take it in 2005) had this as well. It took much longer than it was supposed to, and the entire time was just people asking the proctor how to do certain letters in cursive, and the proctor not even remembering.
But how does that work for scribbles?
What is the purpose of these exercises? There isn’t, as I pointed out above, even a uniform standard for what cursive writing should look like, so it’s not like they could reasonably have penalized people for writing a different form of the letter Q or L. And if the proctor was allowed to tell them what the letters looked like, that obviously wasn’t the purpose of the test anyway. And you say it was just copying a passage, not composing one? Were they doing pseudoscientific handwriting analysis?
Oh, interesting. I was giving the option of “signing” my promissory note on-line. So I did, and all I had to do was type in my name.
IIRC, the statement is something like “I solemnly swear that I will not cheat on this test”, only longer and with more caveats & clauses. It’s bureaucratic, not evaluative.
But that’s exactly the point. Cursive signatures will only endure until alternate ways of identification so overwhelmingly replace a signed name that the need to teach cursive goes away. That a signature will for most purposes be replaced in the future, and probably in the relatively near future, is hardly in any doubt. Written signatures will certainly go the way of wax seals.
That will happen over time, and perhaps they won’t disappear completely. As people have said, though, cursive simply isn’t necessary for any everyday activity. You only think so because you’re used to it. In 100 years nobody will be brought up to think that way.
Oh fuck, the “Q” that looks like a mutant “Q.” I have so many bad memories of penmanship class back in the day. And what was more of a bitch than that was having a mum who had penmanship down to an art. She had the prettiest handwriting I’ve ever seen, and of course, she was a bit big on me being able to write legibly AND neatly.
Having said that, she thought the mutant “Q” was a bit fucked up. She said that it looked like someone took a bite out of the “Q” and what you wrote was all that was left.
It seems to me that all of the examples that were posted are cursive script. Sure, they’re not the model letters one would find above the chalk board in third grade classroom, but I would call them cursive nonetheless. Of course some of the examples have letters disconnected from the rest of the words, but this is something I imagine we all do due to speed or convenience.
Questions:
I always have only use it for my signature, and nothing else.
Good questions. . . I think it was part of some method to prevent cheating. So, if a question ever arose concerning whether someone took the GRE for me, in my place, they had a very sizeable handwriting sample to compare with my writing. Or something like that. But, all the time I was writing I was thinking “Man, they’re going to think I’m illiterate or something.”