Cursive Handwriting for Adults: Improve Your Handwriting

Introduction

Imagine opening your mailbox to find a letter enclosed in a quality envelope, with your name and address beautifully handwritten in a flowing, attractive, individual style. The magic of such a delightful sight makes you want to open the envelope with extra care for fear of damaging the beautiful letter within. With perseverance and practice, you could be the author of such a dazzling letter.

With modern forms of technology sweeping the world, we often write messages now by typing out texts, emails, and the like. The skill of handwriting tends to be a forgotten art, but when it is done well, with an individual style that’s fluid and attractive, it conveys a beauty that seems to defy definition.

This book will show you how to rediscover your handwriting skills or even develop them from scratch, and how to avoid some common errors. You might have ingrained habits of poor handwriting, such as holding the pen or pencil the wrong way. You might be trying too hard and writing with a tensed-up hand that results in an inconsistent, spidery scrawl. To fix these issues, we will start with the basics of holding the pen correctly (sometimes it is best to practice with a pencil), as well as how to sit and how to position the paper. Next, we’ll look at the letter shapes and the rhythm of the hand movements.

Once you have mastered and practiced these initial exercises, I will show you a few flourishes and more elaborate forms. I am sure you will be inspired by looking at samples of other people’s handwriting, and I will comment on why I find them attractive or where there might be some pitfalls to avoid.

CHAPTER ONE

Cursive Handwriting

Cursive might mean different things to different people, but broadly speaking, it is a style of handwriting that involves joining letters to form words. Various styles of cursive have emerged over the centuries. Printing, on the other hand, is a basic form in which each letter stands on its own. This is the way we learn to write in our very early years. Some adults, particularly those who need to write on engineering drawings, have adapted their handwriting to print in capital letters only. Others only write notes or lists that they read themselves and so can get into bad habits because no one else has to read them.

I want you to revisit the time you moved from printing to cursive, when you considered the basics of handwriting and eventually moved on to develop your own style. In this book, we will start with a very basic cursive handwriting style that you should be familiar with so you can get the hang of it, and then you can move on to other related styles.

The examples that follow will be of a standard American handwriting style called New American Cursive. This style is different from my personal style, which I will also demonstrate so you can decide how you’d like to adapt your own handwriting style.

One difference you will notice is New American Cursive style is designed to join every letter of a word together, while my style has fewer joins. As you progress through the basics and solidify your knowledge of the formal style, you can begin experimenting with what feels best for you.

Different Styles of Cursive Handwriting

A square-ended nib often cut from a feather produced the classic italic style that I prefer. In addition to italic, I will also discuss other older styles, such as uncial (see page 8), where the pen is held with the square nib more horizontal and very rounded shapes are formed, often looking more like the Roman capitals that they copied.

Classic italic handwriting slopes slightly forward, and the squared nib produces elegant thick and thin variations.