Is this all that’s missing from the Stateside cursive debate? A little bribery positive reinforcement? Yeah, maybe. According to Editor-in-Chief Elliot, the German kids all go to the store at some point and pick out their first fountain pen, which gave me an a-ha moment. In other countries, kids are forced at some point to use fountain pens. I remember being stoked to write in thin lines of indelible blue ink instead of fuzzy, erasable graphite. Or maybe it was that regardless, eventually you got to use a pen instead of a pencil. Was it the rote memorization of these hieroglyphs? The excruciating attention to detail that our teachers seemed to pay to our handwriting when it came to grading literally anything? Maybe it was the fact that in the States, there’s no real rite of passage attached to learning to write in either script or cursive, except that you escaped the bad marks in the penmanship department. You’d think we would have appreciated learning a way of writing that was more like us - a blur of activity, everything connected, an oddly-modular alphabet that was supposed to serve us well in adulthood. It was as though our handwriting was moving from day to night, changing and moving as fast as we were. We practiced our D’Nealian (So fancy! So grown-up!) on something called Zaner-Bloser paper, which is still used today, and by probably second grade were making that transition from easy Zorro-like lowercase Zs to the quite mature-looking double-squiggle of the cursive version.

Me and my fellow Xennial zeigeistians learned a specific printing method called D’Nealian, which was designed to ease the transition from printing to cursive with its curly tails on every letter. I started learning to write in kindergarten, but that of course was in script, with separate letters. Notice the stroke order and the ridiculous capital Q.īut let’s back up a bit.

D'nealian cursive font in words