What Handwriting Did You Learn In School?

[BreakingInReverse]

I was taught Palmer Method Cursive and this method of printing:

 

http://static.squarespace.com/static/5005cd4be4b046f04f5a1111/5331ef79e4b08fbf00961a26/536a6a6ee4b047c985cba5d5/1399483172219/hwot.gif

It never looked like that. I'm in the process of teaching myself Spencerian business hand.

[frellion]

I learnt using Vere Foster workbooks in the late 80's/early 90's in a private elementary school, using fountain pen. I'm not sure which writing style it was, though--it looked exactly like new Civil Service except that the capital letter Q was closed.

 

I love the style and didn't change it growing up.

Edited November 13, 2015 by frellion

[Runnin_Ute]

Second grade was about 1965. I am guessing based on what I recall it may have been D'Nealian, but I am not sure. This would have been Jordan School District in Utah.

 

I do remember the Q that looked more like a 2.... But my F, I, T, Q no longer look like the D'Nealian samples. It seems to look more like Palmer in some ways. (my F for one) My B still looks like a Zaner Bloser though. So I am not sure, but certainly it is combination currently. I think it is a Z-B or D'Nealian though.

[missphoenix]

I was taught Palmer script in third grade and I think possibly again in 5th grade--this was around 2003-2005 in New Jersey (it appears I'm one of the younger people on this forum). As most of you can imagine, basically everybody in my grade abandoned cursive writing after a while. My 8th grade Spanish teacher required us to write in cursive--something that everybody except me hated.

 

When I got into fountain pens about a year ago, I started practicing cursive again and modified some of the Palmer I'd learned to better suit my style. I usually print with FPs because I'm much more used to it, but I definitely enjoy writing in (Palmer) script as well.

[Dragonmaster Lou]

I believe I was taught Palmer script in the 80s, starting in second grade.

[richila]

My mother was a primary school teacher (1st-3rd grade) and taught me Palmer at age 4, that was what she was teaching her 3rd graders that year, because I wanted to learn and she never passed up a learning opportunity. (I had been reading for a year by then.) I had lovely handwriting until 1st grade when a first year teacher insisted that I print. My handwriting has only recently begun to recover, over 50 years later.

[Piper 987]

Wow... this takes me back to the early 1960's. At my elementary school in North Vancouver BC, we were taught the MacLean Method.

 

http://www.onsitereview.ca/storage/Maclean%20alphabet.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1314111194374

 

It was developed by educator H. B. Mclean of Victoria BC during the 1920's. Unfortunately, my once clear and legible handwriting deteriorated into post-apocalyptic chicken-scratch, made worse by decades of medical practice, which never included handwriting practice.

 

Many times I was told that I have the handwriting of a doctor. My reply was always, "No, it's much worse than that."

 

I'm now retired and trying with marginal success to undo decades of bad habit. My chief impediment is the "death grip" I have on a pen created by decades of writing with a ball point on various hospital papers that nealy always said, "Press hard; you're making three copies."

 

Writing reams of hurried pages in patient's hospital and office charts, didn't help either.

[vjones]

Wow, I have no idea. I think it was "ball and stick" printing, and I never learned cursive in school, though I'm 52. My education was discontinuous so I missed a lot of stuff. Like learning cursive. In the past few years I've started writing italic and I can do italic cursive. Sort of.

[sidthecat]

Palmer Method with a pencil in school, but then I got into comic books in college and learned that style of lettering.

 

My writing has been unimproved until about a year ago when I started working on it again.

Edited December 4, 2015 by sidthecat

[Peppers]

I was taught through the Palmer method. Clearly remember doing pages and pages filled with words.

 

Too bad my career stripped it away from me. Industry forces you to write in bold because of 'clarity' and 'legibility', but the actual problem is that the general population has trouble reading cursive. Cursive is more legible than bold; I've seen horrendous handwriting in bold, scares me at night.

 

I personally ordered some spencerian books to improve and try to remember what I had lost through time.

[cavey]

I was tought this dutch style of writing:

 

png's are not allowed to be linked on the forum, so this direct link will have to do:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dutch_handwriting_sample.png#/media/File:Dutch_handwriting_sample.png

 

It seems the t with the sort of tailpig is a rather rare occurence in the cursive world. I like it a lot better, because you can maintain your writing flow without having to back stroke the t. And most letters seem to flow a lot more into each other.

 

Unfortunately, my cursive writing has deteriorated, but I fondly remember playing around with the stems of the b, l, k, f etc to have it sort of disjointed (upper half offset to the left compared to the lower half), adding an extra curve. Heh, being young

 

Here's a quick picture of the alphabet I just did.

 

Edited December 5, 2015 by cavey

[Rednaxela]

This is the script I learned in school. The method is called 'Eerst duidelijk ... dan snel' which translates to 'First clearly ... then rapidly'.

 

 

It took me quite a while to find this chart as I was not sure about the exact method name, and googling resulted in at least two versions of the script, and very few or quite different complete exemplars. But when I saw this one I recognised it immediately as the chart hanging on the wall in our classroom.

 

This was in the late eighties, but I believe my generation was one of the last to be taught this particular script. My 1-year younger brother had to write differently already, still cursive, but a (slightly) more simplified version.

 

Basically I've never stopped writing cursive, although over time many print letters have creeped in, such as a closed 'p', a print 'r', an 'x' in the form of two crossing lines, and many print majuscules. I think I did this for clarity purposes, but it has taken quite a bit of flow out of my writing if this makes sense. I've started working on my handwriting recently, and for pretty much all minuscules I have managed to go back to the ones in this chart. As for the majuscules, I'm not really happy with the ones I was taught, and I'm still in search for an alternative set that's both practical, looks nice, and fits the rest of the script. But that's perhaps for another discussion. :-)

[Misfit]

Zaner-Bloser simplified looks like what I learned. In time, though, I changed several capital letters, connecting strokes. I imagine lots of us have done that.

[SpokaneNostalgia]

It took me a while to figure this out (in fact, I only realized it after someone on the forum recommended it), but I learned D'Nealian in the mid 1990s.

[nodrog]

Very interesting to go through this thread, looking at all the various styles that people have learned.

 

I don't believe there was any formal handwriting education in my school in London in the 70's, but in one classroom, on the wall, were examples from the Marion Richardson style. I think I mostly learned to write cursive from copying my father's writing, with a fountain pen, when I was about 9 or 10. Needless to say, my writing has changed since then, but seems only to have become quicker, smaller and lazier. I often neglect the downstrokes, so can have trouble deciphering the scrawl when I come back to it.

[linearM]

I was taught using the Palmer method in the 50's.

 

It is interesting looking at the various script styles. I noticed that the script style taught in Spain is very similar to the style taught in France: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/521733-french-cursive-handwriting/. Being neighbors that is probably not too surprising.

[Guardy]

That infinitely ugly thing called Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift

 

[click here for google image results] because there's no way I'm even attempting to use that script ever again.

 

We HAD to write like that from grades 2-4, and it was the most un-intuitive and dreadful-looking thing. Writing like that took ages, the way letters were linked more often than not made no sense, and we were graded on how well we managed to deal with this stuff.
I did not have a good time with any of that.

 

I have never seen anyone write the Vereinfachte Ausgansschrift in a non-clunky and awkward manner and am pretty firmly convinced that it can't be done.

 

After I got out of grade school, when nobody had any right to tell me how to write anymore (as long as it's legible, of course), I immediately and deliberately unlearned anything cursive-related and made up my own way of doing things, pretty much completely from scratch, while integrating things I liked in other people's handwriting.

[miel]

I learned in school originall "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausgangsschrift#/media/File:Lateinische_Ausgangsschrift_1953_plain.svg)

what was the predecessor of "Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift" in Germany.

 

But same like Guardy I changed this when I startet at the Gymnasium (at that time I was 10 - 11 years old) to something inbetween bookhand and roundhand.

 

Now - nearly 40 years later - I start practising my personal interpretation of cursive. A mixture of what I have learned originally and a little bit Spencerian on top.

[kenny]

Uh.. I don't know what is was called. It was "whatever the nuns made us learn" back in the mid-1960s. Really, do you think the nuns would acknowledge that there was any other way except the "right" way that they taught?

 

Looking at text samples, I think it looks kinda like D'nealian, because I remember the "Q" being like a "2" and the "F" had a separate bar, not connected to the lower horizontal line, but I seem to remember it was a little more ornate/had more of the little curls on the letters. So I don't know for sure. Or maybe I never really learned it that well; it's hard to concentrate on the letters when you're busy dodging a nun reaching to grab your ear to lift you by, or to hit you with a ruler.

 

** addendum... I ran across a Zaner-Bloser "Traditional" variant. Now it kinda looks like that in some ways. Just not sure.

Edited April 19, 2016 by kenny

[Sasha Royale]

That was 55+ years ago ! It never occurred to me that it had a name. After five decades of borrowing, stealing, and other modifications, my cursive doesn't look like it any longer.

 

It was white cursive, on green cardboard, above the blackboard -- later greenboard.

Edited April 19, 2016 by Sasha Royale