The printing we were taught in my elementary school was D'Nealian, which is where many letters look like their cursive forms or are similar, but they never connect. They taught these to us to prepare us for learning cursive, evidently forgetting the fact that many of us would eventually choose to just keep using printing, and our letters would look funny to people who'd been taught the normal way of printing.

They also taught us, when it came time to cursive, D'Nealian cursive. I remember that when I was very little, way before they were teaching us how to write, I'd learnt from various books my mom had gotten me on how to write (books for kids, obviously). I went into kindergarten knowing how to read and write, and I might have already known cursive; I can't remember. Anyway, my point is, my cursive is decidedly not the way it was when I was a kid. It's changed a lot. It's nowhere near as loopy and round as it was, and things that go down go way down, and the little thing that goes slightly in on the top of a lowercase r has disappeared and just turned into one humpy lump thing, and often I don't take my pen off the paper to cross my t's and dot my i's and j's. One thing I do is, when I get a d at the end of a sentence, I don't bring the stalk back down the way I would if I had another letter I had to connect to. I just let it go up. Usually it ends up going very high or way left, giving some (or all) of the word a "roof" of sorts. I think it looks kind of neat.

Many of the capital cursive letters could easily connect to the next letter, like the B, J, or S, but I don't connect them, simply because you're "not supposed to."

-eric "I love the capital cursive Q, even though everyone on RinkWorks seems to hate it." sleator
Sat 9 Jun A.D. 2001