So I was reading the US Declaration of Independence and I saw something that looked pretty cool:



Take a look at "ſufferable". They wrote the ff in a different way than I learned in grade 3 cursive, it looks like they wrote an ſ then made the line that crosses the f cross over the ſ they wrote before it - which makes sense, most people would write like that in printing. It looked really cool to me and I started to mimic it in my cursive now.

I'm not sure what these would be called, ligatures? Anyone know of any other letter combinations that change the ordinary writing strokes?

EDIT: Oh, I noticed that in the Declaration there are two ways of writing r, one the normal cursive r, and one which looks more like a printing r. I'm not sure if it depends on what letters are around it though, but I'll check.

That's awesome.

I can barely read cursive but I can't write it.

It's a common ligature (along with fi and a lot of things with f) in printing, but I never saw it in handwriting before.

Holy crap! My friend always writes his English and Vietnamese in cursive. Ironically, sometimes I have trouble reading his writing because of how neat he writes English cursive appears to be much more neater than Chinese cursive.

Also, it seems that the schools here in Western Australia have decided to stop teaching children how to write cursively...they claim it's practically useless and blame it on the computer fonts! Silly excuse.

That's horrible. Cursive is an amazing skill. Well, maybe not amazing but I like using cursive. If done neatly it looks really cool, and if used quickly can speed up writing and especially note taking.

Definetly. Especially when writing for myself, I can write very quickly (but still less than half of my typing speed). My print is quite slow.

Thats weird!

Does the English-speaking world not teaches cursive in schools anymore? I've studied in France in several cities, where they all taught cursive. I've studied in Brazil and here they teach it as something secondary and teach something in between cursive and print shaped letters. It's readable, but cursive is wonderful.

I always appreciate calligraphy!

BTW, that's a really cool image!

Cursive was taught in my day, but I've never really liked it. I find it messy and illegible for the most part. Printing is good enough for me.

In my school they taught D'Nealian, which is like cursive toned down. I live in Texas. I stopped using it a long time back. I taught myself Gregg and use that almost exclusively in note-taking (though I use a lot of letters I made up on my own and I write it right-to-left).