All those countless classroom hours spent carefully drafting cursive letters on that dotted line template, and the only letters I can reliably write are the letters in my name (and I don’t even write them all out anymore, my signature is the first letter of my first and last name with a squiggly line after it). The only class I hated as much was typing, but at least that gave me a practical skill.
You’re both writing in cursive. You’re just not using the Palmer or D’Nealian script.
It’s a method of validating your identity. They don’t care what kind of script you use, so long as it’s your own and it’s something that can be matched with your own handwriting in case there’s a question of fraud.
I learned cursive in grade school, it was the kind with the funny looking Q and S. I used to sign my name using that style, but I decided late in my teen years that it looked kinda feminine with all the loops and such, so I deliberately changed my signature to use a simplified first and last initial since those had lots of loops in the standard cursive (my S now looks like a lightning bolt) and standard lower-case cursive for the remaining letters. As I sped up my signature over time, the lower case has become squiggles, so now my signature is essentially a recognizable first initial with a short squiggle with a tall part on the end, and a recognizable last initial with a longer squiggle with a tail hanging down at the end.
I don’t write by hand much, but I still mostly use the style of cursive that I was taught in grade school, but I use more recognizable S and Qs most of the time. If I’m writing something more formal, I use the old-fashioned kind.
I feel sorry for kids who aren’t learning cursive if they are ever stuck in a situation where they have to write something long by hand. I can print about as fast as I write in cursive, maybe a bit faster, and it’s more legible, but it really hurts my hand after a while. One time when I was doing security work overnight and was writing a story to pass the time, I did the first couple of pages in a fast, somewhat tied together printing style, but shifted partway through into the old-style cursive and it was a lot easier on my hand.
What’s amusing is that my mother actually uses two different styles of cursive, one for when legibility is important, and another for quick things she jots down for her own use. Her quick-and-messy writing is almost indistinguishable (even to me) from my own writing, to the point that when I’m visiting and glance at the calendar, I’ll ask myself “Why did I write that?”.
My own cursive is never legible, so when I’m writing something that needs to be, I hand-print it. I’ve gotten reasonably fast at it, but not as fast as cursive.
So why require it in cursive then? Because personally, you’d have to dig up my old schoolpapers to match my cursive to me. I never use it. I use small caps if it needs to be legible and my own non-joined-up scribble if it doesn’t.
Do we really need to be taught cursive? Cursive wasn’t invented by handwriting experts or anything- it evolved because people were too rushed/lazy/whatever to lift their pens up from their papers. What we do in school is just a formalization of what happens naturally (though it surely happens less often nowadays since we usually type long documents.)
You only need to make up a signature once in your life, so it’s not like you can’t look at old examples and figure it out. Few of us sign anything the way we learned in school- either we get fancy with some archaic form based on old signatures we’ve seen, or we go modern with an indecipherable glyph (I choose the latter). I imagine it will stay this way in the future.
It would surely be counterproductive to require a set cursive (by which I mean the D’Nealian or whatever it’s called) script in a signature, because that would mean that anyone writing the name would write it in a very similar manner!
When I was looking for handwriting images to post above I found this blog post which makes the point that, to British eyes, American cursive handwriting all looks alike (to my mind, like the scrawl that appeared above Charlie Brown’s head when he was writing a letter with his tongue sticking out…)
Totally acceptable. Your signature can be anything you want it to be at all. I work in accounting (kind of) and have a client who signs his checks with an x. No kidding. The first time I went to deposit one of he checks I thought he hadn’t signed it at all becasue all there was on the line was a very small x. The guy isn’t illiterate, he just decided at one point that he signs so much stuff every day that he want the easiest thing possible to be used as his signature. It’s easy to forge, but it’s what the bank has on record as his signature and it is totally acceptable, and he can probably sign 50 documents in a minute using it.
Where did you get the idea that a signature has to be your name written in cursive or that it has to be in cursive at all?
A signature is a sign, any sign, you can reproduce and which allows an expert to make a determination on whether that was, indeed, done by the same person or not. I have never heard anywhere that it had to be your name.
Sorry, I hadn’t read the whole thread so it seems I missed part of the picture.
Then you’re misunderstanding what “cursive” means. It just means they don’t want you writing in block letters. Any natural, flowing handwriting will do.
I bet that when you write by hand, it doesn’t look like the typographic display you’re reading now. It looks like handwriting. That’s “cursive.”
Sailor, I believe Silver Tyger Girl was asking about the SAT/GRE writing sample. I suspect it was a case of poorly written instructions that were intended to have the students write the passage in their own usual script, as opposed to careful block letters normally used on a form, but instead resulted in careful third-grade cursive handwriting that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the students’ usual hand.
If some form of cursive, or joined-together writing is no longer taught in schools, are students losing the ability to read cursive from samples they may come across, or is that ability being learned at a later age than it used to be? Or is it just something kids pick up/figure out once their level of writing skills hit a certain level, regardless?
Personally, I like cursive, and I don’t want it to go away, but I don’t have any practical reasons for it other than “I like it”!
I have always wondered how signatures can be used to any larger extent due to this. Personally my signature looks different each time I write it, whether I like it or not. In light of this, it seems strange that written signatures continue being used for the purpose of signing documents. Nothing stops you from changing your signature all of a sudden, or somebody to falsify it. A signed document is never compared with previous signatures as far as I know, and even if it would happen, my signature is probably different enough each time that it’s impossible to know if any of them is a forgery or the real deal.
For example when signing a contract or official document, what happens if you sign with a different signature and later claim it wasn’t you who did it? They just seem useless for most purposes since there is no way to verify who wrote them.
Actually, handwriting experts can match handwriting, even if it isn’t identical.
Funny story. I tried to sign one of those electronic credit card pads with an “X” once and it wouldn’t accept it. However, it did accept a block letter printing of “I love my wife”. I’ve also signed them with just a long sting of zigzag lines.
How could a handwriting expert match that?
What does Elizabeth R mean?
“Regina”, probably.
Actually I pretty much write in block letters, or at least non-joined-up letters (to borrow the British term). My writing was severely influence by the printing I was reading (especially my numbers. Drove my teachers nuts. And I had one idiot interpret my 4’s as A’s). And if I want it to be legible I have to write especially blocky.
Ah, here’s a picture with an example of my legible writing: Photo Storage | Photobucket
I can scan my normal writing, but it’s the same, just mixed case and more chicken-scratchy.
I actually have a hard time reading cursive, especially when people make it really loopy.