Those Questions on Handwriting

Abstract

From whence cursive script? There is a belief that cursive, or joined, handwriting was invented by an evil genie eager to inflict punishment on innocent school children. Nothing could be further from the truth. Joined writing goes back in history as far as records are found. Even the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were written in joined forms (1). Through the ages man has always had two styles of writing. One is the carefully executed and often highly ornamented formal style used for special documents and handwritten book pages. The other is an everyday, rapidly produced, informal hand. Cursive, applied to handwriting, means a swift, running or flowing style. It was not invented; it simply evolved over centuries. During the gradual development of cursive writing, many scribes added to or subtracted from each form as they tried to speed the writing task. In so doing they rounded many corners, looped many points, and ceased to lift their writing instrument within words. Writing began with pictures; hurriedly made; pictures soon degenerated into symbols that stood for the original, carefully made picture. A few of the endless numbers of picturesymbols became characters that stood for sounds rather than things or ideas. These characters, after centuries, finally became the beginnings of the alphabet used by our culture. The original alphabet, as refined by the Romans, consisted of what we now call capital letters,, They were quite angular when chiseled on stone. When man began writing on bleached hides and early papers, he curved straight lines and took short cuts. By 800 A.D. he had produced a double alphabet-the more rapidly written lower-case letters and the highly ornate upper-case letters, or capitals, used for the first word of the page. At