Cursive

Ligature is writing the letters of words with lines connecting the letters so that one does not have to pick up the pen or pencil between letters. Commonly some of the letters are written in a looped manner to facilitate the connections. In common printed Greek texts, the modern small letter fonts are called "cursive" (as opposed to uncial) though the letters do not connect.

Looped cursive as taught in Britain in the mid-20th century

In looped cursive penmanship, some ascenders and descenders have loops which provide for joins. This is generally what people refer to when they say "cursive".

Cursive italic penmanship—derived from chancery cursive—uses non-looped joins or no joins. In italic cursive, there are no joins from g, j, q, or y, and a few other joins are discouraged.[2] Italic penmanship became popular in the 15th-century Italian Renaissance. The term "italic" as it relates to handwriting is not to be confused with italic typed letters. Many, but not all, letters in the handwriting of the Renaissance were joined, as most are today in cursive italic.

Cursive in English letter from 1894

William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand[7]

Cursive writing was used in English 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 standardized 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 popularized throughout the British Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries as round hand by John Ayers and William Banson.[8]

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 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.

Not all such cursive, then or now, joined all of the letters within a word.

Cursive handwriting from the 19th-century USA.

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 early days of the post office, letters were written in cursive – and to fit more text on a single sheet, the text was continued in lines crossing at 90 degrees from the original text.[9] Block letters were not suitable for this.

Although women's handwriting had noticeably different particulars from men's, the general forms were not prone to rapid change. 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, a movement originally begun by Paul Standard in the 1930s to replace looped cursive with cursive italic penmanship resurfaced. It was motivated by the claim that cursive instruction was more difficult than it needed to be: that conventional (looped) cursive was unnecessary, and it was easier to write in cursive italic. Because of this, a number of various new forms of cursive italic appeared, including Getty-Dubay, and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting. In the 21st century, some of the surviving cursive writing styles are Spencerian, Palmer Method, D'Nealian, and Zaner-Bloser script.[10]

D'Nealian Script, a cursive alphabet, shown in lower case and upper case

One of the earliest forms of new technology that caused the decline of handwriting was the invention of the ballpoint pen, patented in 1888 by John Loud. Two brothers, László and György Bíró, further developed the pen by changing the design and using different ink that dried quickly. With their design, it was guaranteed that the ink would not smudge, as it would with the earlier design of pen, and it no longer required the careful penmanship one would use with the older design of pen. After World War II, the ballpoint pen was mass-produced and sold for a cheap price, changing the way people wrote. Over time the emphasis of using the style of cursive to write slowly declined, only to be later impacted by other technologies such as the phone, computer, and keyboard.[11][12]

Cursive has been in decline throughout the 21st century due to its perceived lack of necessity. The Fairfax Education Association, the largest teachers' union in Fairfax County, Virginia, has called cursive a "dying art". Many consider cursive too tedious to learn and believe that it is not a useful skill.[13][14]

On the 2006 SAT, a United States post-secondary education entrance exam, only 15 percent of the students wrote their essay answers in cursive.[15] However, students might be discouraged from using cursive on standardized tests due to exams written in hard-to-read handwriting receiving fewer marks, and some graders may have difficulties reading cursive.[16]

In 2007, a survey of 200 teachers of first through third grades in all 50 American states, 90 percent of respondents said their schools required the teaching of cursive.[17]

A nationwide survey in 2008 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.[18]

In 2012, 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". Since the nationwide proposal of the Common Core State Standards in 2009, which do not include instruction in cursive, the standards have been adopted by 44 states as of July 2011, all of which have debated whether to augment them with cursive.[19][20]

Many historical documents, such as the United States Constitution, are written in cursive—the inability to read cursive therefore precludes one from being able to fully appreciate such documents in their original format.[21] Despite the decline in the day-to-day use of cursive, it is being reintroduced to the curriculum of schools in the United States. States such as California, Idaho, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Tennessee have already mandated cursive in schools as a part of the Back to Basics program designed to maintain the integrity of cursive handwriting.[22] Cursive instruction is required by grade 5 in Illinois, starting with the 2018–2019 school year.[23] Some argue that cursive is not worth teaching in schools and "in the 1960s cursive was implemented because of preference and not an educational basis; Hawaii and Indiana have replaced cursive instruction with 'keyboard proficiency' and 44 other states are currently weighing similar measures."[24]

With the widespread use of computers, researchers set out to test the effectiveness of both mediums. In a study done by Pam Mueller which compared scores of students who took notes by hand and via laptop computer showed that students who took notes by hand (though the paper does not specify that they were using cursive) showed advantages in both factual and conceptual learning.[25] Another study done by Anne Mangen showed that children showed an acceleration in learning new words when they wrote them by hand rather than on a computer screen.[26] Learning to write in cursive is alleged (by its practitioners) to be a stepping stone to developing neat handwriting, and, in a third study conducted by Florida International University, professor Laura Dinehart concluded that students with neater handwriting tend to develop better reading and writing skills, though it is difficult to conclude causation from such an association.[13] Aside from these cognitive benefits, students with dyslexia, who have difficulty learning to read because their brains have difficulty associating sounds and letter combinations efficiently, have found that cursive can help them with the decoding process because it integrates hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills and other brain and memory functions.[27] However, students with dysgraphia may be badly served, or even substantially hindered, by demands for cursive.[28]

Kurrent (left, pre-19th century) and Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift (right, from 1969)

Up to the 19th century, Kurrent (also known as German cursive) was used in German-language longhand. Kurrent was not used exclusively, but rather in parallel to modern cursive (which is the same as English cursive). Writers used both cursive styles: location, contents and context of the text determined which style to use. A successor of Kurrent, Sütterlin, was widely used in the period 1911–1941 until the Nazi Party banned it and its printed equivalent Fraktur. German speakers brought up with Sütterlin continued to use it well into the post-war period.

Today, three different styles of cursive writing are taught in German schools, the Lateinische Ausgangsschrift (introduced in 1953), the Schulausgangsschrift (1968), and the Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift (1969).[29] The German National Primary Schoolteachers' Union has proposed replacing all three with Grundschrift, a simplified form of non-cursive handwriting adopted by Hamburg schools.[30]