A Short History of Cursive Handwriting

Cursive is a response to a practical problem: writing with a pen is slow if you lift it between every stroke. Joining letters saves time, and the shapes bend to suit whatever pen and surface are in use. The result is that cursive has never been one alphabet. It is a family of hands, each tied to its tools and its era. This is a short tour of the main ones.

History of cursive: Roman cursive

The Romans wrote in several scripts. Formal inscriptions in capitals were for monuments. For daily business there was a quick hand, now called Roman cursive or Old Roman cursive, written on papyrus, on wooden writing tablets coated with wax and on thin wooden leaf tablets. The letters were rougher and more linked than the capitals, and some letters were reshaped for speed.

A famous source is the Vindolanda tablets, thin wooden leaves with ink writing found near Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, and dated to roughly the years 90 to 120 AD. They include letters, accounts and what is probably the earliest known handwriting by a woman in Latin, an invitation to a birthday party. Reading them was difficult for scholars because the cursive forms differ from capitals. Over the following centuries, Roman cursive changed gradually into what is often called New Roman cursive, and many scholars see it as an ancestor of several medieval hands.

How did medieval hands lead to today’s lowercase letters?

Today’s lowercase letters descend from Carolingian minuscule, standardised around the year 800. After the Western Roman Empire fragmented, regions developed their own scripts, such as Insular script in Ireland and Britain and others in Spain and Italy. By about the year 800, under Charlemagne, scribes in the Frankish realm standardised a clear, rounded script known as Carolingian minuscule. Its lowercase letters, with clear spacing between words, strongly influenced later book hands. Italian scholars in the 15th century revived it as “humanist” script, and printers modelled the first roman typefaces on it. Humanists also developed a faster, slanted everyday hand, the ancestor of italic.

For this reason the lowercase letters you write now are descended from letters designed over a thousand years ago, even though the connecting strokes came later.

What was chancery italic?

Chancery italic (cancellaresca) is the narrow, slanted, semi-joined hand that 15th and 16th century Italian chanceries developed for fast, legible documents. Writing masters published manuals to teach it. A frequently cited example is Ludovico degli Arrighi, whose manual La Operina appeared in 1522. Italic spread across Europe and was taught widely, including in England, where it overlapped with other styles.

What was secretary hand?

In 16th and 17th century England, the usual business and legal hand was secretary hand, an angular, compressed script with unusual letter forms. Its e, h and r look very different from modern ones. The letter forms in Shakespeare’s era manuscripts, wills and parish registers are often in secretary hand, which is why reading them is a skill historians need to train. Secretary hand gave way, gradually and unevenly, over the 1600s, as italic and later round hand took over. It lingered in legal documents.

What are round hand and copperplate?

Round hand is the script English writing masters developed in the late 1600s, and copperplate is the name that came from the engraved copybooks. In the late 1600s they developed round hand, a rounded, upright-to-slanted script made with a flexible pointed pen. Its distinctive thick and thin strokes come from pressure on the nib, and the style was popularised by engraved copybooks. The best known is George Bickham’s The Universal Penman, published in parts in the 1730s and early 1740s and collecting specimens by many writing masters.

The name copperplate comes from the engraving: the pages were cut into copper plates for printing, and the engraver’s burin gave the letters their particularly crisp, even look. The term now usually refers to formal English round hand, in particular the style used on invitations and certificates. Round hand became the model for commercial writing in Britain and its colonies in the 18th century, and it influenced American penmanship.

Copperplate was not a quick hand. It was a showpiece used by clerks and for accounts, and lesser forms were used for letters and records.

What is Spencerian script?

Spencerian is a light, oval American script developed in the 1840s by Platt Rogers Spencer. In the United States of the 19th century, handwriting was a mark of commerce and refinement. Platt Rogers Spencer (1800 to 1864), who taught writing in Ohio, developed a style in the 1840s that came to be called Spencerian. It is lighter and more oval than round hand, with slender, graceful shading and a narrow slant. He conceived it as being based on forms in nature, and he and his sons promoted it through business colleges and publications, including the Spencerian Key to Practical Penmanship (1866), published after his death. Spencerian’s flowing capitals are familiar from the Coca-Cola logo, which many writers describe as being in Spencerian style, though the logo itself was drawn for the company.

Spencerian was taught heavily in US business schools and public schools through the later 19th century. It was elegant but slow to master and tiring over long periods, which led reformers to seek a faster, plainer approach.

What is the Palmer method?

The Palmer method is a plain, rapid handwriting system built on muscular movement and promoted from the 1890s.

Austin Norman Palmer (1860 to 1927) taught business penmanship and, from the 1890s, promoted a simpler system built on muscular movement, in which the whole forearm moves on its resting muscle instead of the fingers drawing each letter. His early books, from the mid-1890s (titles and exact dates vary between sources), and later textbooks set out the method. The letters are plain, with few shaded strokes, which made them quicker to write and easier to teach to large classes.

By the early 20th century the Palmer method was the standard in many American schools. Generations of children did circles and push-pull ovals at their desks. If you remember writing rows of connected loops to warm up, you remember a Palmer-style drill.

What is Zaner-Bloser?

Zaner-Bloser is a handwriting system and publisher that grew in Ohio at nearly the same time as Palmer. Charles Paxton Zaner and Elmer Ward Bloser ran a business college and publishing company in Columbus, and their handwriting system became another major US school model. The Zaner-Bloser method uses slightly slanted letters, and in its later versions teaches print first and then moves to cursive in about grade 3. The company remains a major publisher of handwriting textbooks. Details of its dates and corporate history vary by source, so treat early 1900s as a general marker.

What is D’Nealian?

In 1978, Donald Neal Thurber, an elementary teacher in Michigan, published the D’Nealian method, the name coming from his own, with Scott Foresman. The problem he addressed was the gap between print letters (made of sticks and circles) and cursive (continuous strokes). In D’Nealian, the print letters are slanted and have small exit strokes, so a child can begin to join them by extending the tail. The idea was to make the leap from print to cursive smaller. It was widely adopted in the United States and some other countries from the 1980s.

Why did cursive decline?

Typewriters, ballpoints and computers turned cursive from a necessity into a choice:

• The typewriter (commercial from the 1870s) took over business correspondence.
• The ballpoint pen (common in the 1940s and 1950s) made writing less dependent on nib and ink skills.
• Computers and phones moved most everyday writing onto keyboards and touchscreens in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

As typing became essential, school time shifted. Cursive remained part of many curricula, though often at less intensive levels than in the Palmer era.

What did Common Core do to cursive?

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards for English were released in the United States and adopted by most states. They set expectations for keyboarding but did not require cursive, and some states, reading this as a sign that cursive was optional, dropped it from curricula. Critics of this change argued that cursive helps children read historical documents, develop fine motor skills and keep a personal signature.

Through the 2010s and into the 2020s, a significant number of states passed laws or standards requiring cursive instruction again. Louisiana, Texas and California are among those often cited, but states vary in what they require and from what grade, and legislatures have continued to act. We have not tracked individual states’ current laws, so check the education department of your own state or district for the present rule. Research on how cursive affects learning is mixed, and strong claims on either side should be read with care.

What does this history mean when you write?

Joins are old, style follows the tool and there is no single correct cursive.

• Joins are old. Joining letters is not a school invention, it is hundreds of years old.
• Style follows the tool. Pointed pens made round hand’s thick-and-thin contrast, broad-edged pens made italic’s angles, and ballpoints favour plainer strokes.
• There is no single correct cursive. The model you learned depends on your country, your era and your school.
• Print and cursive have always coexisted. Even the Romans used both formal and everyday scripts.

If you want to try writing in a joined hand yourself, start with our guide on how to write in cursive or, if it has been years, the guide on cursive for adults. The history of cursive shows that every hand was built for a tool, so choose the one that suits yours.