This is really really long with lots of pictures, but I hope some people will find it interesting anyway.

With all the concern about the laxness of cursive teaching in schools nowadays, I'm feeling more and more like a relic... and I'm only 20 years old. My mom saved a lot of my school things from grade school, so I thought it would be interesting to scan the progression of my use of cursive and how it changed.

I went to a parochial school from K-7, and public school from 7-12. From what I have found about cursive forms on google, my cursive is some kind of mix between modernized Palmer and Zaner-Bloser. I am now a student in university and still use a lot of cursive, mainly for speed (lots of notes and essay exams). I'd say my cursive has never been or will be "girly", in the sense of aesthetically pleasing loopy handwriting, and I have what I like to call "spiky letter syndrome", when the letters m, n, i, and u, when found near each other, tend to end up being a series of messy spikes making it difficult to distinguish between letters. When I write words like "minimum" I have to count the number of bumps to figure out where to dot the i's.

My mother started me on letter forms the summer between first and second grade. All the letters tended toward vertical, but I seemed to get the hang of the basic form.




We formally began learning cursive in school beginning second grade. The most difficult thing for me was to get my r's consistent with those tricky bumps.


Third grade, from some poem I copied over for a project:


Fourth grade, my cursive underwent some kind of drastic change of which I'm still not sure how exactly it happened. It became much smaller and more cramped. Forth grade was also when teachers began docking off points if you didn't use cursive. I remember a lot of complaining about this, although I didn't mind in the least.


Fifth grade was more of the same cramped style. I seemed to have started to dot my exclamation points with circles...


Sixth grade, my cursive opened up and letters were slightly taller. But the spiky letters became a permanent fixture from here on out.


Seventh grade was when my family moved and I began attending public school. I had begun to despise parochial school anyway so this actually made me happy. When I started public school I was perplexed as to why noone else used cursive. Other kids told me that they had been taught cursive, but noone made them use it and most of them preferred print. They actually thought my handwriting was insanely neat. Which was strange, because my handwriting was considered messy back in parochial school. I guess everything's relative.

My first week in public school I had written up for a group project to be read to the class, and the vapid girl who was supposed to read it actually couldn't read cursive. In retrospect, she was rather dim, but I had spent extra time making sure it was really neat (to show off) and I was flabbergasted that there were people who couldn't even read cursive, let alone write in it.

Seventh grade was also when I took to dotting my i's with little circles in an attempt to make my writing more girly. This was also when my preference transitioned from pencil to pen (ballpoint and rollerball. I really liked anything with a see through ink view window). This sample appears to be a purple RSVP pen.


Eighth grade still had the ridiculous circles. This sample was one of my first in-class essay exams, so this was at or near full speed. This pen was either a Pilot Precise or a Sanford Onyx.


Ninth grade the circles finally went away. My style finally seemed to begin to gel, as the changes from year to year are beginning to be less drastic. This is some sort of generic blue ballpoint.


Tenth grade, the style continues to be consistent. Another essay exam, so this was at or near full speed as well.


I received my first fountain pen for my 17th birthday. Black Waterman Phileas, medium nib, Florida Blue cartridges. One of my first assignments using a fountain pen. (I *really* despised The Scarlet Letter. The fun of writing with the fountain pen may have been the only thing to get me through the unit.)


And finally, my cursive from today. Blue book essay exam from "14th" grade; this definitely was at full speed. Same pen and ink as above.


In terms of occurence of cursive and fountain pens, I'd say that cursive is still used by at least 1/4 of the people I've seen around in lectures, but I have no idea how accurate that is or not. I have never seen anyone other than myself (both students and professors) using fountain pens, however.

My brother is four years my junior and he does not use cursive at all, despite the efforts of my mother and myself. Our move meant he entered public school in the third grade, and it seems the basics were "taught", but the use of cursive was never enforced, and most kids reverted to print. His print is okay, his cursive very awkward. I even tried to get him on fountain pens, to no avail. However, I've seen the cursive of people my own age worse than my brother's, so I often wonder how much of the “cursive problem” can be attributed to the parochial vs. public aspect of schooling, and how much is due to technology.

Thanks for the nice post. it's funny, i was thinking about doing something like this (if I ever find the time) since I have various notes all the way from Junior high, to college, grad school, and now.

My handwriting has also gone through various changes, and some styles have actually bifurcated into parallel courses of evolution So I currently have more than one handwriting style

That was a great post! Very interesting. I don't think I have a single example of my writing from any period in time other than in adulthood.

Thank you for the post! That was seriously cool, watching your handwriting shift and change.

(I wonder if I could do that... I know I have some early writing in a box somewhere.)

That was really really cool! I throw out all my notes because I don't have the space and I'm the kind of person who gets annoyed with so many papers that serve no purpose.

Now I would love it if I got to see how I wrote as a kid or even while in college just a few years ago. So every little thing I see with my childhood writing or scribble on it, I paste it on a piece of paper so it's my little scrapbook page.

That was really fun. I can't believe you have samples all the way back to second grade! It's very interesting when there is a sudden drastic change.

I find it interesting that I can rarely STICK to straight cursive writing. I kind of write in currinting. Half cursive half printing. Even if I say to myself, write it all out cursive. Wonder where that comes from. Anyone else have this trouble?

Thanks, coldwater19! I've watched my handwriting change over the years, in ways similar to yours (of course some of the shapes are/were different).

BTW, was that college exam example from a linguistics class ?

Chupie, I occasionally mix block and cursive on paper, but I frequently mix them on the whiteboard while teaching, especially in words containing lowercase "r."

A few of my students from different East Asian countries have expressed interest in connected cursive for English; another one happened to have asked me today. I showed him how to hold his (ballpoint) pen parallel to his thumb bones, rest his whole hand, wrist and forearm on the writing surface and write from the elbow and shoulder with the least possible wrist participation and absolutely zero finger participation.

He laughed at how different it felt. I told him he'll appreciate it in a week. I also told him that wider ballpoints, rollerballs and gels (and fountain pens), minimum 0.9mm mechanical pencil leads and dull wooden pencils are automatic cursive improvers because they force clearer forms.

Very interesting read, coldwater. Your handwriting samples and the stories behind them, are very similar to mine-- only I went through parochial school from K to 8th grade, then a diocesan high school. So at least up until 8th grade, you HAD to write in pen (except for math class) and you HAD to write in cursive. Or type your reports as this was was only 10 years ago, and computers were gradually becoming more common in everyone's households. Maybe a few teachers lightened up on the "you must write in cursive all the time" rule but I can't remember now. I always preferred cursive to my printing anyway. And my family didn't get its first computer until I was in high school so I had to either neatly write my reports or suffer the electric typewriter.

And yes, the best penmanship grade I ever got in grade school was merely "satisfactory," and I occasionally had to listen to whining from classmates that they couldn't read my handwriting-- even though their own cursive really was illegible. If I ever get a scanner, I'll try to post samples of my current handwriting someday.

My niece and nephew are 3 and 5, respectively and the latter is in kindegarten. Will they even learn cursive writing in the next 3 to 5 years? Several posters have mentioned that American schools employ a "fancy" looping style of cursive, whether it's Palmer or something similar. All I know is, legible handwriting is what matters, whether it's printing, cursive or something entirely different. As someone who's done a lot of data entry from handwritten forms [including doctor's prescriptions!!!] can tell you, clear, readable handwriting makes a world of difference.

I do that, too. If I try to write with just printing or just cursive, sometimes the other just slips in somehow. I am not sure exactly why, but it may have to do with my hand trying to keep up with my train of thought.

Does anyone find their hand writing changes with mood? Sometimes I suddenly write very freely. OThertimes it seems cramped and no matter what I do, just plain icky.

Thanks for posting that, coldwater19. It was fascinating to see how your handwriting changed.

I'm jealous of all you Americans who were taught to write that lovely fancy cursive. In the UK when I was young (in the mid-1980s), we learned a really simple joined-up writing and certainly didn't have any penmanship classes - as long as it was legible, neat and consistent we could write however we wanted really.

I remember that we had to use pencils in primary school until our handwriting was judged neat enough to use a pen; the handing out of pens by the teacher was a big deal! I was probably among the last kids in my class to get one. In fact, my mother tells me that teachers complained about my handwriting - I don't remember it at all though.

After primary school, I changed my handwriting deliberately about once a year; if I saw some little flourish I liked then I'd incorporate it into my own writing. I stopped doing that when I hit my teens but just recently, about a year ago, I completely overhauled my handwriting after getting into Spencerian penmanship.