Cursive

:For the musical band, see Cursive (band).

History

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the development of the typewriter, professional correspondence was written in cursive. This was called a "fair hand", meaning it looked good, and clerks were trained to imitate the exact handwriting of the firm. They were paid by the length of writing on the page, so they preferred variant spellings that had more letters in them. This percolated into the official spelling of French.

Related Topics:
Eighteenth - Nineteenth - French

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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 could not do this.

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And 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 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 be usually taught in second or third grade (around ages seven to nine).

Related Topics:
Nineteenth century - Twentieth century - United States

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After the 1960s, it was reconsidered that the teaching of cursive writing was more difficult than it needed to be. Or else forms of simply slanted characters, termed "italic," were argued as being easier and traditional cursive unnecessary. And also, the copyrighting of handwritten letter forms as a sort of font became profitable. So in the late twentieth century, a number of various new forms of cursive appeared: D'Nealian® and Zaner-Bloser© are two of them. With the range of possibilities available, handwriting became unstandardized across different school systems in different English-speaking countries.

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