I've been practicing my cursive writing. I "leafed" through a couple of hundred year old training books found on a link from this forum. They were fun to look through but I was not motivated to use them for practicing. By 1950-something, when I was in elementary school, somebody decided that the "t" should be crossed even if it ended a word. That's how I was taught it. The old training books used the other form of "t", without the crossing stroke. I decided to trust my knowledge of letter shapes and go to the great lines from the very first topic in this Penmanship forum (can't figure out how to link it to this topic).

I skipped the "quick brown fox" one and went to the other great lines. I would start to write a line and as soon as I noticed a lazy letter (usually the ones with lower loops like "p" or "q") I would work on that letter and then work on the word and then on the sentance. The practice was a little tedius. I think my stiff neck had something to do with it.

I found it challenging to practice the combination of "g" and "p" although they do not occur in a word, and the combination of the letters "w" and "r" which are part of the word "write." In the case of "wr" found it difficult to make the little dipping loop between the two letters.

Finally, I always remembered the brown fox sentence like this: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." versus "jumps over." I'll go with "jumped" because it has an extra letter!

It needs to be "jumps" because that provides an "s."
It needs to be "lazy yellow dog" because that provides a "y."

The point was to test letters of the alphabet.

"The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog" includes all the letters of the alphabet. (You can use "a" in the place of "the" in front of either "quick" or "lazy," but not both; at least one "the" must be in there, since neither "t" nor "h" exists anywhere else in the sentence, as far as I can see.) To use "jumped" instead of "jumps" would leave out the "s"; to deliberately include "yellow" for the sake of the "y" would be redundant, since "lazy" already has the "y." (More subtle issues, such as an interest in writing an initial or final "y," are left to the reader for her to determine for herself.)

A sentence with all the letters is called a "panagramme" I think ... but I couldn't Google much with that word. Others (I don't know where I got this list; I've had a printed copy tucked inside my Moleskines for years, to remind me of them for manual warm-up exercises):

+++ Big fjords vex quick waltz nymph. (27 letters)
+++ Junk MTV quiz graced by fox whelps. (28 letters)
+++ Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymphs. (28 letters)
+++ Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex! (28 letters)
+++ Fox nymphs grab quick-jived waltz. (28 letters)
+++ Brick quiz whangs jumpy veldt fox. (28 letters)
+++ Glib jocks quiz nymph to vex dwarf. (28 letters)
+++ Bright vixens jump; dozy fowl quack. (29 letters)
+++ Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim. (29 letters)
+++ Quick zephyrs blow, vexing daft Jim. (29 letters)
+++ Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. (29 letters)
+++ Sex-charged fop blew my junk TV quiz (29 letters)
+++ How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. (30 letters)
+++ Two driven jocks help fax my big quiz. (30 letters)
+++ "Now fax quiz Jack!" my brave ghost pled. (30 letters)
+++ Vamp fox held quartz duck just by wing. (31 letters)
+++ Five quacking zephyrs jolt my wax bed. (31 letters)
+++ The five boxing wizards jump quickly. (31 letters)
+++ Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31 letters)
+++ Kvetching, flummoxed by job, W. zaps Iraq. (32 letters)
+++ Cozy sphinx waves quart jug of bad milk. (32 letters)
+++ A very bad quack might jinx zippy fowls. (32 letters)
+++ Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (32 letters)
+++ Few quips galvanized the mock jury box. (32 letters)
+++ The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog. (33 letters)
+++ The jay, pig, fox, zebra, and my wolves quack! (33 letters)
+++ Blowzy red vixens fight for a quick jump. (33 letters)
+++ A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. (33 letters)
+++ Joaquin Phoenix was gazed by MTV for luck. (34 letters)
+++ Heavy boxes perform quick waltzes and jigs. (36 letters)
+++ A wizard's job is to vex chumps quickly in fog. (36 letters)
+++ Watch "Jeopardy!", Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game. (37 letters)
+++ Woven silk pyjamas exchanged for blue quartz. (38 letters)
+++ Brawny gods just flocked up to quiz and vex him. (38 letters)
+++ My faxed joke won a pager in the cable TV quiz show. (39 letters)
+++ The quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf. (39 letters)
+++ The lazy major was fixing Cupid's broken quiver. (39 letters)
+++ Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes. (40 letters)
+++ Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen. (41 letters)
+++ My girl wove six dozen plaid jackets before she quit. (43 letters)
+++ Six big devils from Japan quickly forgot how to waltz. (44 letters)
+++ "Who am taking the ebonics quiz?", the prof jovially axed. (44 letters)
+++ Big July earthquakes confound zany experimental vow. (45 letters)
+++ Foxy parsons quiz and cajole the lovably dim wiki-girl. (45 letters)
+++ Have pick twenty six letters not forcing a jumbled quiz! (46 letters)
+++ Jack quietly moved up front and seized the big ball of wax. (47 letters)
+++ Few black taxis drive up major roads on quiet hazy nights. (47 letters)
+++ Crazy Fredericka bought many very exquisite opal jewels. (48 letters)
+++ Sixty zippers were quickly picked from the woven jute bag. (48 letters)
+++ How razorback-jumping frogs can level six piqued gymnasts! (49 letters)
+++ A quick movement of the enemy will jeopardize six gunboats. (49 letters)
+++ All questions asked by five watch experts amazed the judge. (49 letters)

People mistakenly use these panagrammes as tongue-twisters or as vocal-exercise warm-ups, such as before choir or theater rehearsal. That's silly; they aren't designed for mouth exercise, they're designed for typographic display. In similar manner, people often make the mistake of calling them "lorem ipsum" or "latin" text; they aren't that, either. The famous nonsense sentence beginning "lorem ipsum dolor ...", which is chock full of fake but Latin-sounding words, is stuck randomly into empty spaces reserved for text, and thus used by typographers and visual designers to get a good idea of what something looks like without being distracted by verbal meaning.

So much can be done with so little ...

My favorite (which you might not notice, lest I point it out) in the list is:

+++ Kvetching, flummoxed by job, W. zaps Iraq. (32 letters)

What did the 'other' 't' look like?

I take it you are referring to the Spencerian letter t , like on this link where the word 'bought' has an uncrossed t at the end http://www.iampeth.com/lessons/spencerian/...ian_page10.html . It seems that the sharp upwards curve is supposed to serve in place of the cross line in order to increase writing speed. You must remember though that handwriting is your own and that you can customise it how you want, if you do not like that form of t then go with the more usual crossed t.

Sometimes simply looking at and studying various letter-forms in instructional texts can be just as helpful as executing them.

Back in cuneiform days, when I was active duty US Navy, I worked with teletype machines (if you are old enough, you might remember TV newsmen with the clicking sounds in the background - those are teletype machines, printing off the AP or UPI "wire" transmissions". When one of our teletype machines acted up, or if our HF (high frequency radio) link was of marginal quality, we would run a "fox test" until all was hunky dory. It consisted of the following:

the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy white dogs back 1234567890 times

This exercised the type box completely, and utilized every letter of the alphabet, and all the numbers. It did not include punctuation, but military communications can survive without punctuation.

Donnie

That variant of the terminal t was also allowed/taught in Palmer Method cursive back in the 1950s when I learned it.

Donnie

Yup, they are called pangrams -- or Googling "alphabet sentences" also works.

Get thee to a dictionary!

• bagpipe
• bagpiper
• bagpipers
• bagpipes
• eggplant
• eggplants
• flagpole
• flagpoles
• gangplank
• gangplanks
• gangplow
• gangplows
• kingpin
• kingpins
• magpie
• magpies
• pigpen
• pigpens

The version I remember is "The quick sly fox jumped over the lazy brown dog".
Maybe a few more redundant letters, but I like the verbal rhythm.

Regards, Myles.

I will never play Scrabble with you but thanks for the heads-up.

The only one with pg I can think of is popgun.

campground
campgrounds
mpg
popgun
popguns
shopgirl
shopgirls
stopgap
stopgaps
upgrade
upgraded
upgrades
upgrading

I learned "The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog".

Like mrdavie said I will never play scrabble with you. I bet you beat them all on Countdown too.

I think you're missing an "s", unless my brain is deceiving me again - so it needs to be either "jumps" or a "sly" fox, or some other variation including an "s".

Regards, Myles.

It is trivial to get lists like this with /usr/dict/words and the standard grep commandline utility on any UNIX.

That's easy for you to say.

OK, so it's in /Library/Dictionaries/whatever.