What Handwriting Did You Learn In School?

[TSherbs]

I was taught straight printing to develop my literacy (in America in the 1960s).

 

Then, Palmer, for cursive all through grade school.

 

Freed myself from the prison of that unfortunate approach when I was about 14, and I have been writing with hybrid variants ever since. I will never return to fully connected writing.

[randomist]

Slightly simplified Copperplate. Everyone hated my handwriting except one English teacher in the school after the one that taught me to write copperplate. Then I found stub and cursive italic nibs and all of a sudden everyone likes it.... It has evolved since I first learned it, I've made one concession to non-cursive readers in that my v is now pointed and I can use a couple of different forms of r, but usually go for one with a vertical stroke as the other can look like a c if I'm rushing.

[alextkeane]

I learned D'Nealian in Washington State in the mid- to late-90s. I'm not fond of most of the capitals from it, my own style kind of tossed them out once teachers stopped bugging me.

[BigbyWolf]

I have no idea what it was officially called, but I'm pretty sure I learned the Palmer method. Middle 1980's, Oklahoma City.

[KKay]

They never told us what style we were learning with cursive. (that I remember) But after doing some checking, it seems it was a cross of D'Nealian and Palmer. I do remember my older teacher saying get your fountain pens out. Funny because we never used fountain pens in school. She was just used to saying that. I thought that is what you called a Bic ball point for years.

Edited May 13, 2016 by KKay

[Kalessin]

I'm pretty sure I had older-style Zaner-Bloser with all the fussy loops and the 2-shaped capital Q, though I seem to remember it being referred to as "Zanerian" by my penmanship teacher. She was super-understanding about teaching a left-hander like me.

 

This was in elementary school near Boston, in the mid-1970s. We learned first in pencil, and then moved up to ballpoint pens, but never fountain pens. Both of my parents used (and still use) fountain pens, but my grandmother thought they were to much of a mess and bother, and used ballpoint, though she had perfect cursive writing.

 

While I can and do write in the cursive that I learned, my everyday faster handwriting is a large-and-small-all-capitals printing from when I got all rebellious in seventh grade.

 

 

[Anderglan]

http://www.typografie.info/3/uploads/monthly_05_2016/post-34345-0-94462300-1462129558.jpg

[ThisIsntFunnyAnymore]

I'm pretty sure we learned D'Nealian manuscript in earlier grades to practice slant and "tails," then moved into D'Nealian cursive in 4-5 grade. I remember the upper-case Q & Z, and the capitals definitely didn't have any extraneous flourishes or loops. Billings, MT, early 1990's. I don't think we ever used pens, or at least were not required to use them. My writing was never good, so even that young I would write out my rough draft of a report and type my final.

 

In High School I took drafting classes and learned all-caps lettering. That served me well for a long time.

[Fabienne]

Ugly Palmer.

[MYU]

We learned whatever was standard for script writing, which I believe may have been Palmer. This was only during elementary school. In middle school and high school, you were expected to type up your papers, and when writing sentences on tests, you were to print mixed case.

[policefoxlyn]

I was at junior school (ages 7-11) from 1977-1981 and was taught Nelson handwriting, especially by my teacher when I was 10-11 who despaired of our previous teachers who'd only loosely taught that method. She very much drilled the correct method into us. In those days and for a few years later my handwriting was beautiful. Mine was not improved by my "improvements" made as a teen. Then hindered further by lots of essay writing with a Bic where I had to hold the pen at an almost upright angle in order to not blob the ink.

 

In later years, as a police officer, I've ruined my hand, writing pages and pages of statements. I get cramp, have a lump on my middle finger and get (in golfing parlance) yips.

 

I've now decided to go back to basics and practice my handwriting again. I've got a couple of the later Nelson Handwriting books and also the Write Now book which is a very similar style.

 

I'm currently writing with a propelling pencil as I have a tendency to the death grip and pressing too hard, the propelling pencil stops this. My writing has improved over the past three days.

 

I know Nelson Handwriting and similar fonts seem not popular here but even at its worst, people have admired my writing for its legibility and I was taught that it was a simple style which was efficient for writing in exams. I like its simplicity!

[Plumette]

Like many of you, I have no idea what the handwriting I was taught in school was called. I think it was the Palmer method, but the capital F's and T's were different -- more like the Z-B letters, except the extended part of the tail on the F formed the crossbar, and the extended part of the tail on the T didn't touch the upright part. (Does that many any sense at all?). We learned the alternate form of the lowercase r, the one that didn't look so much like a horizontal squiggly line.

 

My first name is Glenda, and I absolutely hated the look of that capital G we were taught. I thought it was the ugliest thing on earth. We began cursive in third grade, at the age of 8, and it was a big kid rite of passage. By the time I was in sixth grade (which was still elementary school in my time) I had enough courage to rebel, in a quiet scholarly way, and experiment with developing a hand I liked. I wrote teeny tiny letters because I was persuaded by the Victorian novels I affected at the time that that was how ladies wrote. And I finally found, and kept, a capital G that I liked (it looks a lot like British cursive). I routinely got bad grades in handwriting that year, but I was sticking it to The Man.

[amberleadavis]

I was surprised to see the changes in the modern Zane-Bloser.

[SubodhK]

In India, in 1988-89, I was taught the following type of cursive from the exact same book:

 

Sadly, around ten years later, all of us were told to change to block letters, especially for exams.

[amberleadavis]

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2016_2_Ink/08-August/slides/2016-08-15_Ink_04.jpg

[amberleadavis]

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2016_2_Ink/08-August/slides/2016-08-15_Ink_05.jpg

[amberleadavis]

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2016_2_Ink/08-August/slides/2016-08-15_Ink_06.jpg

[FOUR X FOUR]

Here in the south, I don't think it had any other name. It was just called cursive.

[effika]

Zaner-Bloser printing until 2nd grade, where we learned D'Nealian cursive. (The school made a change that year, and we were the lucky ones to switch directly into D'Nealian!) I have a strange mix of print-cursive now! Sometimes things slant, sometimes they don't.

[zuerincolour]

Some sort of mash up between D'Nealian and modern that the teacher made up. We had certain letter combinations that we "couldn't" join up. Just glad that we were even taught cursive since it was 2001 when I starting learning.