Like others, I use a mixture of block and cursive. I can trace this back to high school and college when I first started having to take lecture notes. I find that it’s faster for me than either cursive or printing alone.
As an interesting side-note–I have on my desk a document written by a Chinese woman who learned English fairly late in life and she writes the same way.
(I apologize if I double-post here. There was an error, and it appears that I didn’t get posted the first time).
How about the size issue? If what you use handwriting for is to mark up printed documents and write notes on small slips of paper, it is an advantage to be able to cram more text into a small space. I cannot imagine being able to write cursively as small as I can print.
(My normal printing is about half the height of the rules on a legal pad, and, yes, I’ve had people carp at me for printing stuff in tiny little letters. Anybody else either do this or really object to people who do this?)
I think there are several things going on here. First, I agree with Tomndebb - most of us don’t have to write THAT much by hand anymore, especially compared to our parents and grandparents. I can’t remember the last time I wrote more than a paragraph. I do take notes during seminars, but they’re not really the kind of notes that require long paragraphs. In the sciences and engineering you’re usually scribbling down diagrams, labels, and maybe bulleted points and such. Not a lot of long sentences.
Second, I don’t think cursive is taught as rigorously as it once was. My grandmother told me stories about her school years, and we never had anything like it. Not only did they have extensive practice in cursive through the early grades, but all the way through high school any papers they turned in would be graded on penmanship, and if their penmanship grade was low they had to turn in hundreds of practice lines in the areas the teacher felt were weak.
As a result, by the time the kids graduated from high school cursive was second nature, and the average readability was no doubt much higher than it is today, leading them to use it even more in day-to-day life.
I have dozens of letters from my Grandparents, and they all used cursive writing right up until they died.
Even when well done, cursive is hard to read in large quantities, IMHO. The only thing I write in cursive is my name. I’m curious if any or all the block-printers use cursive for such important things as signing checks and creditcard receipts.
Lik most of the people here I stopped using cursive as soon as I could get away with it. However, in late high school I realized that my cursive is actually much neater and nicer looking than my printing. I guess this is because I haven’t used it enough to develop any bad habits. Since I came to college I have tended to take my notes in cursive since it is easier to read later – it’s also faster to write in cursive.
Since some people have mentioned typing, I’d like to add that I do wish schools would teach kids to type properly when they are young. No one ever taught me to type (I learned on our home computer on my own), and I never learned to do it right. I can type pretty quickly, but I don’t use all my fingers and I tend to hit the keys too hard. This led to my developing tendonitis at the tender age of 18!
I feel I must be surrounded by illiterates. I have awful handwriting but come on! Yes, most of what I write these days is using a keyboard but there are still many ocassions when I have to handwrite a few pages because I am taking notes or have to write a letter or whatever. If I saw a date of mine write such thing in block letters I’d never call her again. It gives me the impression of being illiterate.
Yes, my handwriting is plain awful and illegible even to me. What I do is try to go slower and do the script we learnt in school. It looks like a kid wrote it but it’s legible.
If I get a letter written in illegible handwriting I think the sender is inconsiderate. If I get a letter written in block letters I think the sender is illiterate. Both produce a negative reaction in me.
WAG: I think Americans tend to use block letters more than Europeans.
Heh. Get your notes subpoenaed sometime. You’ll quickly learn that having cursive handwriting legible to you alone is not enough. I take notes in block now, thanky very much.
BLock lettering according to my brother is the only style they accept on reports in police stations. So, both he and my father (both cops) print in block lettering. I think it’s second nature to them.
Anyway i usually write in a mix of cursive and printed letters. However, my cursive is a horrid scrawl that’s barely legible even to myself. I’d say it’s more often ligatures than real cursive, all to speed up my writing. I hate writing by hand actually. My hand gets less tired typing, and when I had to write an essay by hand, i found that my hand got tired after two pages.
It’s odd though. My printing and cursive are horrible when I write in Latin script, but if i’m copying something in a foreign script it’s very legible (my friend liz says I write my name in Katakana like a girl…whatever that means ;)).
Wouldn’t want you to seem illiterate. 
When I write, I (and I’ll bet most others here) don’t hash big blocky caps onto the page with a crayon clutched in my fist. In fact, my printed ‘script’ looks pretty stylish, IMO.
A friend of mine who’s been using his Palm Pilot for a while now says that he’s caught himself writing notes on paper in graffiti (the Pilot shorthand system). It sort bears out my opinion that the human factors people did a very good job in designing the graffiti alphabet - you learn it quickly, and it’s very natural.
Like so many others above, I use a combination–and again, it’s not “real” cursive in any sense of the word, but a set of connections that work, and breaks where they don’t work. I find that as I develop this system, I include more and more connections, and less breaks.
I also find that I like the cursive “r,” stupid as it may look, because it takes one stroke whereas a print “r” takes two. And similar things. I don’t dot my “i” after writing an “f,” just as you’ll find in many fonts in print. All of my f’s, even the print ones, have a below-the-line tail. All of my g’s are basically figure 8’s, making a letter that would have taken three strokes normally take one stroke instead. And so forth.
I’m sure you all find this incredibly exciting. I know I do 
LL
This seems to be a common misconception. I heard about a study a couple of years ago: The conclusion was that people who normally print can print as fast as people who normally write can write. In my opinion, this strongly argues in favor of moving straight from teaching printing to teaching typing, which is faster than either printing or writing cursive.
As an experiment, I tested myself printing, writing, and typing one minute on several differnet passages. The results:
printing: 37 wpm
writing cursive: 29 wpm
typing: 59 wpm
At least for me, prining is more efficient than writing cursive, and more legible too. But I admit that if I normally wrote cursive, I could probably improve my writing speed.
Quoth manhattan:
Are grocery lists even subpoenable? Most of what I write in cursive is strictly for my own benefit, and of very little interest to anyone else. Any writing in my homework is cursive, too, but there’s very little of that, and the meaning is usually carried primarily in the equations. I find cursive to be quicker, but whenever legibility is an issue, I print or type.
If people are subpoenaing your notes, why would you want them to be able to understand them?
When I was in elementary school, in Great Falls, Montana, they were trying an experiment in a “new” writing style, called “cursive italic”.
If I had a scanner, I would put the alphabet up somewhere, but it mostly looks like cursive and Times Roman had a kid, then hit it in the head and shook it a lot.
I was pretty good at it, as it did allow for a smooth flow. I’m lucky that one of my teachers taught us cursive (against the policy) 'cause when I moved to California at the start of 7th grade…
I had a report due for english, my first in my new school. I worked all night writing it, getting it perfect. When I showed my step-mother, she said: “Nice, but you should write it now… they wont take printing on a final draft.”
I burst into tears.
I spent months trying to learn this new writing style, and my handwriting is now printing. I can no longer do either writing method decently…
Well, I don’t use cursive because I have never liked it or been able to write in cursive nearly as fast as I can print. And I do print a good deal, as it’s rather impossible to lug my computer to class for notetaking, and even if I could, the mathematical expressions and diagrams would be a real bitch. I’m also faster printing than typing.
I used to use cursive all the time, but once I started college and needed to take notes rapidly, I found that printing was faster for me. My cursive doesn’t suck, it’s just big and seems slow to me. For example, to make a cursive “o”, I have to go up, over a bit, stop, then back around to the place where I stopped, then back to the right again to connect with another letter. It just seemed so incredibly slow and inefficient.I think the fault lies with the teachers in third grade, who taught us this goofy handwriting system with the ugly capital “T” and “F”, not to mention the large number 2 that passes for a “Q”. I read somewhere that this system, the name of which I’ve forgotten, is incredibly time-wasting and awkward, compared to another system of calligraphy-inspired writing. Right now, I find I incorporate some cursive joins to my printing, so I’m developing a hybrid of my own. I took a course in “ABC shorthand” in high school, and as a result, I use some of the capitals they taught us in the class, which are much easier and faster to write than the old way.
I print almost exclusively now. I tried writing in cursive the other day just to see if I could - I had forgotten some of the letters.
How it happened for me - taking notes in college. I found myself using a bizarre mix - some words cursive, some print. Turns out I subconsciously mimicked the text written on the board or overhead. Often those were printed for legibility to the class, and so I consciously shifted to print. After that, I never had much use for cursive (other than my signature).
Podkayne, great link. That site pretty much says what most people here say about their own script. The school taught system is cumbersome and too fancy and elaborate to be legible while fast. The suggested corrections are things that a lot of people seem to be doing anyway. Dropping fancy capitals with lots of loops, but adding short connectors between simplified letters. I’ve found myself doing similar things. Sounds like a great idea. We should concentrate on teaching this in schools for writing.
Would you believe that I wasn’t ever good at it in the first place? 
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Anyway, I am a lefty which smeared it all anyway.
Plus print is easier to read. Why do you think that type is mostly in print.
Isn’t it weird that even though most people print. Almost everybody uses cursive writing for their signature.