While I learned cursive, after all, I'm 76-years old, I never really used it all that much, certainly not after starting engineering school where I learned that it was critical that what you wrote was unambiguous and so I started to print everything, and that has stuck to this day. The only thing that I ever write, using cursive, is my signature. Everything else, if I need to write it out, is by printing it, using block letters. Granted, that does make it a bit hard when it comes capitalization and such, but at least it's more readable then would be my cursive. BTW, my signature is unreadable, but it is recognizable, which is all a signature needs to be.
That being said, there's probably another reason why my cursive was so poor. You see, I learned TWO different methods of, what we called back then, penmanship. I went to a Catholic school through the third grade, where we were taught the 'Palmer method' of writing. But during the summer between my third and fourth grade, we moved from the city to a small town in Northern Michigan where I attended public school. We had a Catholic church but no school as the town was too small (when I was in the eighth grade, there were only six students in my class). Anyway, they taught a different method of penmanship, that had significant differences. While no one ever mentioned it at the time, I've since learned that this new penmanship method was called the Zaner-Bloser Method. Anyway, having to live through that change resulted in me having, what the teachers called 'poor penmanship'. Needless to say, I never got good grades in penmanship ever again, and this is partly what motivated me moving to using printing, or what is officially referred to as the 'manuscript style' of 'writing', that is the use of individual letters which are not connected. And then when I started in engineering school and then working summers as a draftsman, what with having to produce engineering drawings and specifications using block letters, I abandoned any form of cursive altogether, except for my aforementioned signature.
Anyway, that's my history with respect to the use of cursive.
OCU
