Handwriting standard

I was in one of the junior grades at school when a new handwriting standard was introduced into schools by the state government educational department. Students in my year level were the first to be taught the then-new standard, called South Australian Modern Cursive, and the first to never be taught the funny old-fashioned style with extra loopy bits all over the place.

In theory, we were occasionally reminded, school policy was that primary school students were expected to adhere reasonably closely to this standard, whereas secondary school students (i.e. grades eight and up) had the right to use whatever handwriting style they wanted. I’m not saying that’s how it worked in practise, but it was reported to be the policy.

Consequently, I grew up seeing the shapes that one chooses to give letters and numbers as a significant form of self-expression. I’m not talking about the aspects of handwriting which are inescapably unique to each individual and mostly generated at an unconscious level; I’m talking about the aspects of handwriting which are a deliberate, conscious choice. Consider a scenario in which you are appointed Emperor, and it becomes fashionable among the nobility to write the same way you do. That doesn’t mean the nobles would literally share your handwriting, but the aspects that they could share, that lend themselves to hypothetical standardisation, those are the aspects I’m talking about.

Here is an illustration of South Australian Modern Cursive, the style we were theoretically supposed to use in primary school. (I’ve left out the number zero from these illustrations because it’s not significantly different from the letter O.)

Here’s a representation of my personal standard. It’s the things like the lower-case ‘f’ without a rise that make it mine. (I sometimes draw the capital “I” with serifs and sometimes not, depending on circumstances.)

Here’s a dynamic representation of the same; it shows the direction in which the pen moves as I draw each letter. You might like to see how many of my letters are drawn differently from yours. Notice that almost every letter begins either near the very top, or else near the top of the bit which isn’t the stem; exceptions include the numbers four and eight. I feel this consistency is an important attribute of the style; other people’s handwriting often doesn’t share this feature.

The way this image is intended to be viewed is that you put your eyes up close to the screen and look directly at the letter that you are interested in, ignoring all the others. Then move on to the next letter and repeat. Don’t try to watch the whole image simultaneously.

(Reminder: this earlier post contained two examples of my handwriting from when I was nine years old.)