Hi, I want to make my handwriting beautiful and I think I like the cursive style of writing. But as I searched for some sources, It appears that there are different styles and I don't know which one is better. How is your penmanship? How did you learn to write cursive? Any advice from your own experience or good sources of learning on the Internet?
My penmanship has deteriorated since we practically do everything on a keyboard now (even my signature has changed!) but to answer your questions, I learned cursive writing as a child in school. I don’t remember anything about it except the workbooks were yellow and black and there was a lot of practicing the letter o. Haha If I were doing it now, I think I’d look up online tutorials for calligraphy. I’ve always found that “handwriting “ really beautiful.
Are you on reddit? If not, make an account there. There are a couple of subreddits on penmanship and handwriting. I'm sure someone over there will be able to guide you. I, myself, prefer printing. I'm trying to learn an engineering/architect style and just for fun I would like to try a typewriter/dymo font sometime.
It's mostly just practice off of templates like the one above this, and then practice in your own unique style until it becomes muscle memory (that's exactly what my real signature looks like, since I used that template to refine it and practice it a million times). Everyone in the United States was required to learn cursive in school until about 15 years ago, so I learned it at around 7 years old and my parents made me keep practicing it after it was no longer taught.
My printing is very pretty. My cursive handwriting is readable but not aesthetic lol. I learned in school. They basically said "Adults handwrite and don't print. You're going to need to know how!". But like the "you won't have a calculator everywhere you go!", thankfully both ended up being a lie lmao
I hated that one so much, and one of my best timed moments as a kid was calling out my math teacher for using a calculator to grade our test scores minutes after she had just told us we wouldn't have calculators as adults.
I know this chat is probably done but I am bored and wanted to add more. I have good penmanship for printing but my I have remedial penmanship class in my 4th grade. It was very boring and it was just so I could read the mean teachers hand writing because I could not read cursive. I do not remember many capital letters but I know all lower-case letters in standard american cursive. There are other cursive types like Sutterlin, it is Kurrent Script. Looks pretty but is hard and lower case makes no sense. I learn my american cursive when I was young and from my mean teacher. She give me a paper that had the letters and tell me to memorize it if I do not want to be held back. I learn Kurrent script to annoy my history teacher this year but I am already forgetting. I learned the same way but I did it of my own choice so it was more fun. I still do not like penmanship but I hope you have fun.
Oh yes! My teacher tell me the same when I am in elementary. They also say everyone write cursive and that I need to write in cursive too. Then my teachers in middle school tell me everyone write on the computer and that cursive was hard to read so I was very mad 12 year old at my old teachers.
My writing is a mixture of print and cursive. It's mostly print but there are a few letters that I write in cursive. My teachers taught me cursive in school, but I found it incredibly difficult and used to get punished a lot for not getting it right. The particular style we were taught was quite specific and I just couldn't seem to get the hang of it. I remember having to stay behind and practice from a work booklet which I despised. Unfortunately, it began to hold me back academically. I got so caught up in getting my letters exactly right my writing was much slower than everyone else and I didn't complete my work. Since I didn't want to get punished, or have my work get marked down for not being the right letter style, I spent a lot of effort trying to perfect it. Yet no matter how much I tried I could not for the life of me remember all the little rules that went into that particular cursive style. It got so bad my parents had to intervene and ask my teacher to allow me to write in print. Unfortunately it took a lot of convincing, but eventually the school allowed it. This made a massive difference and I finally had a chance to catch up with everyone else. I felt relieved that I didn't have to spend any more of my break times constantly rewriting certain letters from a work booklet with my only company being a ticking wall clock. My penmanship is good. It is quite easy to read my writing. However, I don't want to learn any more cursive than the few letters I still write in that style. I like my writing as it is and I find it hard not to think of full cursive in a negative light after my experiences. My writing style is something that I identify with and it wouldn't feel right to me to do it in any other way. However, I do not want to deter you from your goal of learning cursive. It isn't for me but that doesn't mean it can't be for you.
I'm old school. I still write everything in cursive. I've been told my penmanship is neat and readable. I find it quicker and easier to write in cursive than to type, tap or even print but I think that's just because I'm used to it. My 3rd grade teacher was a hard ass tho. If she couldn't read your writing, you wrote it again multiple times until she could.
Does anyone here do Italic Script? I think Cursive is what they tried to make us do at school with blue biro. But my Dad bought me a fountain pen and taught me Italic script. It didn’t go down well, but the teachers had bigger battles to pick so left me to it. I’ve loved calligraphy all my life as a result. I don’t do anything with it other than an interest in nice handwriting. Now I’m revisiting the idea of learning Cursive!
When I was in grade school, I had a vocabulary book with all the ABC's in cursive. My parents told me to learn it because people use them in real life.... Being a 'good child'(how I hate that word now, off topic) I copied them and tried to write in cursives whenever I could. It's actually useful sometimes when you're trying to jot down something real quick.
Unfortunately I think when I’m jotting something down quickly my handwriting is not recognisable as any type! It’s a nice skill to have though being able to write like that when you want to. Actually, I haven’t looked, but I bet YouTube is good for tutorials and Pinterest aswell. I might check it out for inspiration.
Thanks for the lengthy response. I learned many things from this thread I didn't know before. It seems many people have had such bad experiences back then. Also, I wanted to make my penmanship a little fancy. Either by cursive style or not. And I don't think it's much difficult. I have more important priorities for now, But I will make make it done later. Thanks anyway.
My writing is crap. Always has been. Now my Mom and Dad. Wow! Their handwriting was beautiful even when they were in their 80s. They learned back in the 30s with the "Palmer Method".