When I was at school, we used fountain pens only (Hifra), and spent a great deal of classroom time practising our cursive. Each letter had to be light on the way up, dark on the way down. Being left-handed and smearing ink all over my page and my hand, I was told to use my right hand. My right-handed writing was awful. As soon as I could, I moved back to writing with my left hand and making a point of writing well. I print 99% of the time rather than using cursive. My writing has changed over the years, becoming bigger and rounder.I am not sure what that means, given that graphologists argue that personality can be seen through handwriting. My handwriting also tends to be untidy when I write bookings in my calendar, and very neat when I write notes for my students. I have been told several times that I have ‘teacher’s handwriting’.
Nowadays, people write less often by hand, and find it harder to read older cursive. But me, I love seeing gorgeous handwriting. Not calligraphy, not fancy ‘fonts’, not signwriting – just plain neat handwriting. I found this BoredPanda article with 110 examples. My absolute favourites are these:
