This is a good example of why cursive writing should be taught, and why we should resist the temptation to type or text everything.

A touching momento, aok, I get that.

Alisande, I don't follow the connection you're suggesting. People who print (and don't use cursive) also have a "handwriting". My mother, who was a well educated person especially for her generation, certainly knew cursive but never used it. Everything she wrote used non-cursive writing. Do you call that "printing", or "block letters", I don't know. Her handwriting style was distinctively her own and I can still vaguely picture it.

I agree with both of you. Whether the handwriting is cursive, or block lettering like my architect father, it's still written by hand. Text and digitally written words have no personal connection.

There's a handwriting style in between cursive and printing, known in my day as 'boarding school script'. It's got the simplicity of printed letters, but some are joined together. I tried to find an example online, but Google doesn't seem to have heard of it. Elmer, perhaps that's how your mother wrote?

Hmm. What did it look like?

My mother's writing was pretty much all in the form of upper case letters, she didn't much use lower case but for a few exceptions (as I recall). Words would be capitalized by writing the first letter larger, later letters and regular words in a sentence were smaller. The only cursive I remember seeing was her signature.

It's funny how we remember little trivialities like this.

I love ”encountering” lists, cards, photos.

Not only handwritten, but typed. My dad was a wonderful note-writer, and i have come across the carbons of many that he typed. There’s and extra delight in that for me, somehow, that he made carbons.

Interesting, Elmer. Boarding school script isn't all caps; it really looks like a cross between cursive and printing. I'll keep looking for an example.

aok, I agree, a piece of paper with one of my late parents writing on it would mean a lot. I have papers with my parents writing on them and they are precious to me.

Elmer, I would call it printing. I suppose you could call it block lettering, too, but to me block lettering is more precise and formal..

I write in cursive all the time. I print, too, but printing is hard for me and cursive just flows. I believe knowing how to read and write in cursive is very important. I feel like people have an important part of their education by not learning that. My youngest granddaughter only knows how to sign her name in cursive and that's pathetic.

Reddit to the rescue. This is the style of handwriting I'm talking about:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Handwriting/comments/pyiwxs/how_is_my_handwriting_ive_just_got_a_new_fountain/

I think my Babar books are published in that script!

Good point, Elmer. My husband's handwriting was printed, except for his signature. But it was still uniquely his, and no one would ever mistake it for Garamond, Calibri, or Times New Roman. I'm sure you could say the same about your mother's writing.

I believe genetics plays a role in our cursive writing. My mother's handwriting was totally different from my father's, and yet some of my letter combinations resemble one or the other--even though my mom died when I was a child.

I have trouble reading my great-grandparents’ generation script. It’s often hard to tell if they are writing in Danish or in English, it’s that hard to decipher.

I've saved samples of my mother's handwriting, which is somewhat similar to mine, but a bit more petite, except for her capital letters.

I also have a copy of some letters written by my great grandfather in German script, and I am the only one in the family who could read them. They are still difficult because German handwriting is difficult to read, since so many of the letters are so similar, and I have to know the meaning of what he was writing in order to decipher it. I very seldom use German or Russian handwriting, although I know both of them. In the past, Danish was written using German script or handwriting.

I have three fountain pens and two different colors of ink - purple blue and dark turquoise.

All of my diaries are written in cursive, but at times, I have written parts of them in German and Russian so that they would be more private. When I was in Mexico, I would sometimes write them in Spanish. I don't think anyone will ever read them after I am gone 😢.

I wrote in cursive when I entered college and then changed to a combo of printed and written letters. One Prof said it was like a different person wrote from the beginning to the end of the semester. I still write/print exactly like that today. I write more like my father, nothing like my mother. My son writes like his dad and my daughter, me. My grandson and his dad write exactly alike.

I have two pieces of correspondence between each parent and myself from when I lived out of state. I treasure them and I have their personal effects so I come across things in their handwriting every once in awhile.

I recently had reason to go into my bank for some paper signing and the young man that worked with me told me that he could not read cursive and even had to ask others what the memoes from the bank manager said because they were handwritten using cursive. I have to say that it lowered my opinion of him. I think when the schools stopped teaching cursive, they made a big mistake. While it can be difficult to read the writings of long ago, it can be done. It's often looked at as another "language". We lose something as a society when we lose the ability to communicate in more than one or two ways.

I know exactly what you mean, aok. My mother has been gone many, many years, but when I run across scraps of paper with her handwriting, i am wistful for a moment.

Absolutely!!! I do as well.

I found some score-sheets when we played Hearts. Tom always did the tallying. I put a couple in the binder that I have of his other mementos. .A newspaper article when he did the Patsy Cline show, his set lists when he and his band-mates played, etc etc.

I also recently came across a letter that he had written. He sometimes put his thoughts on paper, and kept them. They were about us as a couple and how much I meant to him

Bpath, that type in the Babar book is standard French script, called attaché, or cursive in French.

Just in case French handwriting resembles Bookwoman's mother's writing, here it is on Séyès ruled paper.

Zalco, it's Elmer's mother's writing that was the question, but from what he described I don't think it looked like that.

Oops, sorry for losing track of the thread.

My son’s first name is ten letters. It was pretty funny taking him to apply for his learners permit. He had to sign a couple places. He never learned cursive. That took a while!

But back to the OP, what a nice surprise that must have been!

When my father died recently, my mom wanted to quickly change the message on the answering machine. She doesn’t like calling someone and hearing a deceased spouse’s voice. My wife thought to quickly record the message. Probably only way I’ll ever hear his voice again. The little things!

No problem. A great example of Franglais in that text, zalco. - un ordinateur equipe d'eye tracking.... I've heard from time to time PC (pay say) or com-put-ter used instead of ordinateur too.

Edit to add-

There were some quite difficult fonts used in German printing up through the mid-20th century that I found hard to read. Lars must have encountered these. I've seen these fonts used sometimes on store signs and names of places like restaurants, very occasionally on menus, so they must be viewed with some kind of nostalgia or cultural significance. I wouldn't call them challenging because for me, it was mostly not possible to quickly make sense of them.

food, tell your son if he dislikes his name, he should blame his parents.

I remember once having to inconveniently leave work a bit earlier than I would have otherwise, to hurry home to take a kid to sign up for soccer. We went to a school auditorium, I hurriedly filled out the form, and we sat to wait for our part of the alphabet to be called. My son, probably 8 years old at the time, tapped my arm and said "Hey Dad, that's not my name or my birthday". I looked down at the form I'd completed and he was right - I got the first and last names right, but for the middle name and birthday entries, I'd used his brothers'. He was slightly hurt, not too badly, and we had a good laugh. We still laugh about that all these years later.

Haha FOAS. Now you've got me thinking what your son's name can be! A new quiz! LOL

Bartholomew; Jonathan, Englebert, Christian. Maximus, Frederico, Maximilion

Psst, jasdip - only the last one has 10 letters.

My mother wrote in elegant, perfect cursive. I have numerous recipes and letters from her.

My father never finished 6th grade. He wrote in cursive but it was more difficult to read.

Recently we needed to locate our septic system which Dad installed when he built the house in 1962. I found his orginal diagram handwritten on a 3" x 5" piece of scrap paper.

Needlessto say between Dad's handwriting and his propensity to drink beer while he worked in the yard, the measurements were off and the diagram was only able to give us a general location. The rest was up to high tech ground penetrating radar and cameras.

Still I cherish that little scrap of paper. It reminds me of a bygone era and my Dad.

Yeah, I was quickly thinking of long names, just to get some out there.

My dad printed in all caps when he wrote letters or cards, except his signature.

When I was in school and had to write papers, or even at work needing to write research reports, I found that trying to compose while typing was as easy as writing everything longhand - the thoughts just seemed to come together and flow out of my pen that way. Since I then had to type it (I wouldn't use my so-called "assistant" whose job it was to do that, because she refused to proofread - actually I doubted that she could spot her mistakes), and I am still a very slow typist, they took longer to complete overall, but the composition part was far faster & easier.

My father, who spent most of his school years in an orphanage, also wrote in a mostly printed with some cursive hand. His handwriting was distinctive and instantly recognizable.

I loved Mom's writing, too. She was a leftie and always got her fingers slapped, trying to force her to use her right hand.

She turned the paper instead of her hand and it was nice, slanted writing.

My handwriting is terrible, it's legible but far from elegant. It's a combination of cursive and print and even through the nuns tried their hardest to teach the Palmer Method I never mastered it. I've been scarred for life by the D I got on my 4th grade report card in Penmanship.

My mother loved to cook and had numerous cookbooks plus recipes she had written down, many tucked into her cookbooks. She had nice handwriting so they are fery easy to read. Although we already had many of her recipes before she died, my brothers and I divided up her cookbooks eventually, going through them and sorting out some of the written recipes. I treasure those written recipes, which still hold their place in her cookbooks.

We made copies of those we wanted so I do have several that are copies.

I also still have a few letters my grandmother wrote to me when i was a child. They had moved to east Texas for my Grandfather’s job when i was around 6 and I missed her terribly. And she had kept some I wrote to her, which I was given when she died. We were very close and I enjoyed reading those.

There used to be a form of cursive writing that was called a Legal Hand. It was a squared blocky printish form of cursive that was very plain without all the curlicues. Lawyers learned it.

I was taught more than one form of cursive, something that happens when you move a lot. Whether or not certain tall letters were shorter than others and how you made k's or q's seemed to be the issue. I have had persnickity teachers. I write a blocky sort of cursive that doesnt connect up in all the conventional ways just like my mother and older sister. Must be genetic.

I have my mother's handwritten cookbook. I think she was taught the Palmer method and her sisters wrote just like her. In my attic is a box of 100's of letters between my husband and me written daily when we were at different colleges. They haven't been looked at since we wrote them.

I get a special ping in my heart when I go through my recipe box and find one in Mom's handwriting. She too had lovely handwriting.

That's why I treasure my old recipe box. There are hand written recipes from my mother, my grandmother, my favorite aunt and great aunt. I love seeing them ( and seeing the writer again in my mind).

I hadn't realized my handwriting was not strictly cursive until reading the above threads -- I seem to mix cursive and printing as well. At least it's pretty legible unlike my husband's. He would write a message on the blackboard and the kids and I would all try together to figure out what he was saying. Still a challenge sometimes to read his grocery lists on the board.

Something about handwriting...I kept a notebook from my dad's Contract Law class. My parents met in that class in law school. I also kept a small leather box with ticket stubs (baseball, football) from the 50s and 60s. Knowing that these items were in his hands is moving to me.

I saved many written notes from my relatives. My mother was taught the Palmer Method, she had beautiful handwriting. In her later years she had familial tremors and could no longer write very legibly. My uncle was left-handed, but was forced by the nuns to write with his right hand. The remainder of his life he was ambidextrous. My handwriting has evolved over time - from cursive to mostly printing. I don't know why that happened, I try to write in cursive from time to time, but it's difficult for me now.

Bookwoman If you read the OP, this thread is not about how Elmer's mother wrote.

aok27502, it looks like you're not alone when it comes to treasuring a piece of paper a loved one wrote on.

I knew what you meant, but I became keenly aware when I went downstairs to bring up the fall decorations. She has been unable to decorate her own place, as she was wont to do quite often. I gained her decorations, when she went off to a nursing home. Today, I opened them for the first time. Though, she was not like Amy in her decorations, she still was beyond the norm. And she decorated for every holiday. I'm surprised she didn't have decorations for Groundhog Day!

Worse, I could almost walk to where she is, but I have not been able to see her since July.