For anyone my age: cursive hands down.
When I was invited to Japan where I lectured (in English) my host gave a talk and invited me. I didn’t understand a word, but afterwards I asked him whether he could write faster in English or in Kanji, since the latter seemed painfully slow to me. He agreed that he could write English much faster. He wrote in cursive.
For me , after over 35 years in Engineering, it is printing. My cursive was in such disuse, that I can’t read my own.
I haven’t written in cursive since I was in elementary school. I doubt I’d be able to at all. So it’s printing for me.
I can’t answer this poll.
All of my writing with the exception of my signature is a mixture of cursive and printing. Letters easily strung together are in cursive, others are printed. It sounds messy, but I have very neat easy to read writing.
My cursive is a LOT faster than my printing. Part of that is because my printing is rather engineer/draftsman-like, and part is because I’ve written in cursive my entire life, especially note-taking in undergrad and grad school, so I’m more or less practiced at writing it fast.
Somehow my cursive blended with my printing, and now I do something that is an amalgam of both. It’s still illegible, however.
Thank gods I live during the era of the keyboard.
Printing. Considering how often people remark upon it, I’m apparently a rare lefty that has very easy to read printing. I have nicely legible cursive too ('cept I turn the terminal e in my last name into a dash), but it takes close to twice as long to make it readable than printing does. I do a lot of tracing over parts of the letter with cursive, since no one trying to teach me in elementary school actually knew how to teach kids who weren’t right-handed so I had to learn aproximations of what the workbooks showed.
Cursive is much faster, but I’m the only one who can read it. I take notes in cursive, but if I need someone else to read it, I type it out. Printing is reserved for my whiteboard at work.
I don’t think i could write a page of cursive legibly at all, much less faster than I print.
<tries>
OK; make that unable to write a cursive sentence. It’s apparently been way, way too long since I used it for anything but my signature.
Taking the OP’s “legible fashion” requirement into account, cursive. Flowing Policy debates* and waiting tables granted me the ability to write as fast as most people can talk, but only I can read it, and even then only for about an hour after writing it — nonetheless, to the extent that it involves recognizable characters, those characters are printed.
When I had to speed-write essays in college, though, those were in cursive. I wouldn’t have made bets on their legibility, but apparently my professors could read it well enough that they didn’t complain.
*No worries if you don’t know what this means; it just indicates that you were less of a dork in school than I was, which is probably a compliment.
I make lots of story notes and my cursive is both faster and more legible than my printing.
My printing tends to change quite dramatically according to my mood, I once did a long hand written exam and the tutor asked about the writing changes (after marking). I went through the test and basically, the less confident I was with the answer, the worse the writing was. The ‘easiest’ answers were in my best, clearest cursive, the worst in a crabbed and almost unreadable print.
I should thank my form two (12 years old, so 7th grade?) teacher who drilled us in handwriting, we filled sheets of newsprint with cursive. I wish I could get my daughter to do the same.
3 years of Drafting ruined my cursive as well. I think. I abandoned cursive around 14, and when I try to write in cursive now, it looks like a 12 year old’s handwriting. It’s like I picked up where I left off (+/- a few years due to disuse).
My printing is neat and fast, though.
Cursive by a mile. But it’s about a 10th of the speed (and a hundredth of the readability) of my typing.
Cursive.When you think about it printing requires that you lift the pen from the paper and place it down again with each letter written, with cursive each word is one continual motion.
My cursive is much faster.
So why do I print so much? Because I’ve figured out it’s easier to train myself to print than it is to train all the Norwegians in my life to read my North American Catholic School Cursive 
I went to a Catholic grade school and oh man those nuns were obsessed with The Palmer Method. We would fill endless workbooks with writing exercises to learn the proper method of holding the pen all the different loops and flourishes of each letter.
Exactly. My “cursive”? WTF is that?!?
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that cursive seems to be falling by the wayside with the younger generations.
Cursive simply involves a lot of effort for little return. After all, what is there to use cursive for? People all type now; if you are going to concentrate on a skill, you’ll get much more out of typing than cursive. And both printing and typing are much more legible than cursive, as well.
On the other hand, though, with cursive you’re making a lot of extra strokes. Consider cursive “f” - baseline to top, loop around, go way back down below the line, come back up to the centre again. The amount of distance required for a print “f” is much less, even lifting your pen off the paper (which you only need to do by a mm or so anyway).
I cast my initial vote for “print” btw. And I think the main reason why that is is because the cursive letters are more complex so require a lot more concentration to get right - speaking as someone with fairly mediocre fine motor skills, the extra effort slows me way down. Which is, of course, why I abandoned the whole caboodle in the first place.