> I have also never seen the time advantage in
> cursive. I am left-handed, and like most
> lefties, my normal handwriting is awkward and
> illegible. Like I said, cursive is an art, and
> I put an effort into making my cursive
> beautiful and easy to read. It is a chore,
> however.
>
> Typing is of course the easiest, followed by
> printing. But cursive shouldn't disappear---
> there is something intimate and flattering
> about receiving a handwritten letter.

Cursive is only slower because you try to make it look pretty. If you're just writing things out with little attention to æsthetics, then cursive is much faster than printing. Faster still, though, is called print-writing. It's kind of hard to explain, but basically it's cursive that takes the pen off the paper to dot i's and j's, cross t's, and stops after a downstroke to start the next letter on a downstroke.

I write in cursive, and the way of doing it I'm most used to and comfortable with is almost completely illegible. Depending on their positions within a word, the following lowercase letters can end up just being a line:
a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x.
Granted, the i will have a dot over it, and the x will have a big slash through it, but the words "win" and "war" and "man" will be indistinguishable (except for the dot over the middle of "win").

So I've started writing the way I used to before I started writing the way I described above. Instead of vaguely Arabic-looking lines, I now have words full of humps and bumps. If you watched my hand before and then watched it now, you would say that my hand would just move to the right, occasionally going up or down or to the left. If you watch my hand now, you'd say it bounces up and down like a Richter detector. This new style (which I actually used before I started the long, vaguely curvy line method) is more legible, although it could use some work.

My printing is, by far, the most legible, but it's the least attractive, the slowest, and it's all in capitals. In fact, I've spent so long without using lowercase in printing that when I wrote out the alphabet in printing in capital and lowercase out of boredom, I couldn't remember how I used to make an "f" (I still don't remember).

-eric "When I write my last name in cursive, I usually connect the lowercase c to the capital G next to it (McG - - - )" sleator
Sat 9 Jun A.D. 2001