Cursive

For the rock band, see Cursive (band).

A cursive alphabet — lower case and upper case.

Cursive is any style of handwriting that is designed for writing notes and letters quickly by hand. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic writing systems, the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single complex stroke. In fact, the word comes from the Latin cursivus, meaning "flowing".

In the UK, the phrase "joined-up writing" or "joint writing" is far more commonly used, while the term "running writing" or "handwriting" is most commonly used in Australia. Cursive is also commonly known as simply "handwriting" in Canada and New Zealand. Cursive is considered distinct from the so-called "printing" or "block letter" style of handwriting, in which the letters of a word are unconnected, and from "print-writing", which is a cross between cursive and printing, with some unconnected letters and some connected. In the Hebrew cursive and Roman cursive, the letters are not connected. In the research domain of handwriting recognition, this writing style is called "connected cursive", to indicate the difference between the phenomenon of italic and sloppy appearance of individual letters ("cursive") and the phenomenon of connecting strokes between letters, i.e., a letter-to-letter transition without a pen lift ("connected cursive"). The origin of the cursive style is associated with practical advantages (writing speed, sparse pen lifting avoids ink smudges with the quill) and the individuality of the provenance of a document, as opposed to machine font.

Cursive Arabic

Verses from the Qur'an in Classical Arabic, written in the cursive Arabic script.

In the Classical Arabic script, letters of any given word are joined to one another by a continuous flowing line. This flowing script inspired the cursive of Medieval Latin, which in turn developed into the longhand script of English.

Cursive English

Cursive writing was used in English before the Norman conquest, and was an inheritance from Classical Arabic. 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 sixteenth century. However, in the handwriting of William Bradford, in the early seventeenth century, most of the letters were separate, but a few were joined as in a cursive hand. By the late eighteenth century, a century and a half later, the situation had reversed; in Thomas Jefferson's draft of the United States Declaration of Independence most but not all of the letters were joined. The presentation copy of the Declaration, written professionally a few days later by Timothy Matlack, was written in a fully cursive hand. Eighty-seven years later, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln drafted the Gettysburg Address in a cursive hand that would not look out of place today.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the typewriter, professional correspondence was written in cursive. This was called a "fair hand", meaning it looked good, and clerks in a firm were trained to write in the exact 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. 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-nineteenth century, comparatively few children were not taught cursive, and, as it was an important skill, more emphasis could be placed on learning it; there was no pervasive striving for efficiency in the classroom. Few simplifications appeared as the middle of the twentieth century was reached. An example of the timeframe in which cursive came to be taught is that in the United States, it would usually be taught in second or third grade (around ages seven to nine).

After the 1960s, it was argued that the teaching of cursive writing was more difficult than it needed to be. Forms of simply slanted characters, termed italic, were considered by some to be easier and traditional cursive unnecessary. Because of this, a number of various new forms of cursive appeared in the late twentieth century; D'Nealian, Getty-Dubay, and among them, these models lacked the craftsmanship of earlier styles such as Spencerian Script and the Palmer Method, but were less demanding, because the aesthetics were no longer as valued. With the range of options available, handwriting became nonstandardized across different school systems in different English-speaking countries.

With the advent of computers, cursive as a way of formalizing correspondence has fallen out of favor. Any task which would have once required a "fair hand" is now done using word processing and a printer. Increasingly, the teaching of cursive is being de-emphasized in schools, and is generally reserved only for situations such as timed tests with large writing portions, where it is considered faster, although this use too is falling out of favor. Many teens and young adults in Europe and North America no longer use cursive at all, although some often connect letters when printing in ways that are not considered correct in cursive, such as joining the cross-bar of a "t" to a following "i".

William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand

Cursive in English letter from 1894

United States Declaration of Independence

Cursive Hebrew

The Hebrew alphabet in cursive script, read from right to left.

Main article: Cursive Hebrew

Cursive Hebrew script is a style of Hebrew calligraphy that is very popular for writing Modern Hebrew by hand, since it is easier to learn and faster to write than the traditional Hebrew script. It features round letter shapes as opposed to the standard "square" Hebrew script. Like other cursive systems, it was designed to make writing down notes easier.

Cursive Roman

Example of old Roman cursive.

Main article: Roman cursive

Roman cursive is a form of handwriting (or a script) used in ancient Rome and to some extent into the Middle Ages. It is customarily divided into old (or ancient) cursive, and new cursive. Old Roman cursive, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Roman alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. New Roman cursive, also called minuscule cursive or later Roman cursive, developed from old Roman cursive. It was used from approximately the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; "a", "b", "d", and "e" have taken a more familiar shape, and the other letters are proportionate to each other rather than varying wildly in size and placement on a line.

Table of 19th-century Greek cursive letter forms

Cursive Greek

Main article: History of the Greek alphabet

Ancient Greek cursive script, 6th century A.D.

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.

Cursive Russian

Main article: Russian cursive

The Russian Cursive Cyrillic alphabet is used (instead of the block letters) when handwriting the modern Russian Language. Some letters look much like Latin or Roman cursive alphabet letters but most have different sounds. 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 Russian 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.

References

See also

• Cursive script (East Asia) (Grass script)
• Sütterlin and Kurrent - German Cursive
• Paper
• Pen
• Penmanship
• Spencerian Script
• Palmer Method
• Emphasis (typography)

External links

• Lessons in Calligraphy and Penmanship, including scans of classic nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century manuals and examples
• The Golden Age of American Penmanship, including scans of the January 1932 issue of Austin Norman Palmer's American Penman
• Download Normal and Bold Victorian Modern Cursive electronic fonts