Cursive handwriting



Cursive (from Latin curro, currere, cucurri, cursum, to run, hasten ) is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic writing systems, many or all letters in a word are connected. The name is most commonly used to describe the method of writing that instructs students to join every letter in all words. In the United Kingdom and in Ireland, the phrase "joined-up writing", "real writing" or "joint writing" is far more commonly used, while the term "running writing" or just "cursive" is most commonly used in Australia. Cursive is also commonly known as simply "handwriting" in Canada, New Zealand, and the US. Cursive is considered distinct from the "block letters" or "print-script" method of writing, in which the letters of a word are unconnected. A distinction is sometimes made between cursive hand(writing), such as the D'Nealian method, in which the risers of the letters are slanted loops, and letters such as f, r, s, z, D, F, G, L, Q are quite distinct in shape from their printed counterparts, and italic hand(writing), such as the Getty-Dubay or Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting methods, which eliminates loops. There are no joins from j, q or y, and a few other joins are discouraged.

The cursive that developed in the fifteenth century, Italian Renaissance is generally referred to as "Italic" or "Cursive italic." The term "Italic" as it relates to handwriting is not to be confused with typed letters that slant forward. Many, but not all letters in the handwriting of the Renaissance were joined, as they are today in cursive italic.

The origin of the cursive method is associated with practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile, easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. Steel dip pens followed quills. They were sturdier, but still had some limitations. The individuality of the provenance of a document was a factor also, as opposed to machine font.

Cursive Greek


The Greek alphabet has had several cursive forms in the course of its development. In antiquity, a cursive form of handwriting was used in writing on papyrus. It employed slanted and partly connected letter forms as well as many ligatures. Some features of this handwriting were later adopted into Greek minuscule, the dominant form of handwriting in the medieval and early modern era. In the 19th and 20th centuries, an entirely new form of cursive Greek, more similar to contemporary Western European cursive scripts, was developed.

English cursive
The English used joined-up writing before the Norman conquest. Anglo-Saxon Charters typically include a boundary clause written in Old English in a cursive script. A cursive handwriting style—secretary hand—was widely used for both personal correspondence and official documents in England from early in the 16th century.

Cursive handwriting developed into something approximating its current form from the 17th century, but its use was neither uniform, nor standardised either in England itself or elsewhere in the British Empire. In the English colonies of the early 17th century, most of the letters are clearly separated in the handwriting of William Bradford, though a few were joined as in a cursive hand. In England itself, Edward Cocker had begun to introduce a version of the French ronde style, which was then further developed and popularised throughout the British Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries as round hand by John Ayers and William Banson.

Back in the American colonies, on the eve of their independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, it is notable that Thomas Jefferson joined most, but not all of the letters when drafting the United States Declaration of Independence. However, a few days later, Timothy Matlack professionally re-wrote the presentation copy of the Declaration in a fully joined, cursive hand. Eighty-seven years later, in the middle of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln drafted the Gettysburg Address in a cursive hand that would not look out of place today.

Note that not all such cursive, then or now, joined all of the letters within a word.

In both the British Empire and the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, before the typewriter, professionals used cursive for their correspondence. This was called a "fair hand", meaning it looked good, and firms trained their clerks to write in exactly the same script.

In the mid-19th century, most children were taught the contemporary cursive; in the United States, this usually occurred in second or third grade (around ages seven to nine). Few simplifications appeared as the middle of the 20th century approached.

After the 1960s, there arose an argument that cursive instruction was more difficult than it needed to be: that conventional cursive was unnecessary, and it was easier to write forms of simply slanted characters called italic. Because of this, a number of various new forms of cursive appeared in the late 20th century, including D'Nealian, Getty-Dubay, and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting.Most of these models lacked the craftsmanship of earlier styles such as Spencerian Script, Zaner-Bloser, and the Palmer Method, but almost all were less demanding. With the range of options available, handwriting became non-standardized across different school systems in different English-speaking countries.

With the advent of typewriters and computers, cursive as a way of formalizing correspondence has fallen out of favor. Most tasks which would have once required a "fair hand" are now done using word processing and a printer. However, some western etiquette advocates the use of longhand in personal notes (e.g., thank-you notes) to provide a sense that a real person is involved in the correspondence.

English cursive in education
In one academic study, first graders who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute were given 45 minutes of handwriting instruction for nine weeks; their writing speed doubled, their expressed thoughts became more complex, and their sentence construction skills increased. . This study is sometimes cited as support for teaching cursive. However, the style of handwriting used in this research was not a cursive style.

On the 2006 SAT, a United States college entrance exam, only 15 percent of the students wrote their essay answers in cursive.

In a 2007 survey of 200 teachers of first through third grades in all 50 American states, ninety percent of respondents said their schools required the teaching of cursive.

A 2008 nationwide survey found elementary school teachers lacking formal training in teaching handwriting to students. Only 12 percent of teachers reported having taken a course in how to teach it.

In 2011, the American states of Indiana and Hawaii announced that their schools will no longer be required to teach cursive (but will still be permitted to), and instead will be required to teach "keyboard proficiency". As of 2011 the same was true of Illinois. Since the nation-wide proposal of the Common Core State Standards in 2009, which do not include instruction in cursive, the standards had been adopted by 44 states as of July 2011, all of which have debated whether to augment them with cursive.

Cursive Russian
The Russian cursive Cyrillic alphabet is used (instead of the block letters) when handwriting the modern Russian Language. Whilst some letters resemble their Latin counterparts, not all of them represent the same sound. Most handwritten Russian, especially personal letters and schoolwork, uses the cursive Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet. Most children in Russian schools are taught by 1st grade how to write using this Cyrillic script.

Cursive Chinese
Cursive forms of Chinese characters are used in calligraphy; "running script" is the semi-cursive form and "grass script" is the cursive. The running aspect of this script has more to do with the formation and connectedness of strokes within an individual character than with connections between characters as in Western connected cursive. The latter are rare in Hanzi and the derived Japanese Kanji characters which are usually well separated by the writer.  File:Semi-cursive style Calligraphy of Chinese poem by Mo Ruzheng.jpg|Semi-cursive style Calligraphy of Chinese poem by Mo Ruzheng File:CMOC Treasures of Ancient China exhibit - classical poem in cursive script.jpg|classical poem in cursive script at Treasures of Ancient China exhibit File:Cursive characters dragon.jpg|8 cursive characters for dragon File:Calligraphy of Cursive and Semi-cursive styleby Dong Qichang.jpg|Calligraphy of both cursive and semi-cursive by Dong Qichang File:Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain.jpg|Four columns in cursive script quatrain poem, Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain. Attributed to Emperor Gaozong of Song, the tenth Chinese Emperor of the Song Dynasty File:XingshuLantingxv.jpg|Chinese poem in cursive File:ZhiYong1000charcter.jpg|One page of the album "Thousand Character classic in formal and Cursive script" attributed to Zhi Yong

