Cursive Capital Letters: From A To Z

Are you interested in learning to write all the capital cursive letters, from A to Z? This article will show you how to write all the capital cursive letters as well as discuss some interesting facts about cursive.

The list of capital cursive letters below will help you get acquainted with uppercase cursive letters. You’ll want to go over each of the letters in this list thoroughly and practice them daily until you can join them together with no problems.

Why Learn Cursive?

Perhaps you are wondering: why learn cursive at all? The principal argument given for becoming proficient in cursive writing is that, compared to writing in print, writing in cursive lets one write faster and more efficiently.

Cursive letters have joins, parts of the character that links them together with other characters, enabling a quicker writing speed. When writing in print, one has to lift their writing implement far more often than writing when in cursive. In addition, it is argued that precisely because fewer people are writing in cursive, writing in cursive may cause people to take you more seriously and grant you gravitas.

While of the common form of cursive that most people write in has joined linking letters together, not all types of cursive have these joins. There are at least three different varieties of cursive: looped cursive, italic cursive, and ligature cursive. Looped cursive is what most people envision when the word “cursive” is sad, the looping form of writing that has ascenders and descenders and links letters together.

Another type of cursive writing is ligature cursive, which is distinct from other types of cursive. Ligatures possess joins between letters, meaning that one can write quicker in comparison to printing, some older texts that use ligature refer to the smaller letters within the font as “cursive” though in this instance the letters aren’t actually joined together. Italic cursive is a form of writing that uses no joins or in some cases, non-looped joins. The term italic cursive gets its name from the fact that it was used in the 15th century in Renaissance Italy, and it should not be confused with italic letters in typefaces, which simply means that the letters are slanted. In italic cursive, there are no joins that link the letters Y, G, Q, and J together.

Where Does “Cursive” Originate?

The term cursive is typically said to be derived from a Latin word – “corsivo”. This means “to run” or “running”. As for the development of the cursive writing style, the connection of letters together in a flowing fashion, various cultures throughout history have utilized connected writing styles. Various Roman forms of writing used connected letters, as did many Arabic writing styles. The style of cursive that is used to write English is the evolution of a writing style developed during the 17th century in Western Europe. Over the 17th and 18th centuries, this cursive style evolved and become more widely adopted, eventually receiving standardizations that made it the new template for writing the English language. The style of cursive used in the US today has been around since the days of the US colonies, with various revisions here and there.

Much as print has different writing styles and fonts, cursive has different standardized versions as well. The cursive style that most people use today is based on the D’Nealian script, which is itself derived from an older cursive teaching method called the Palmer method/Palmer script. In the late 1970s, the schoolteacher Donald Thurber adapted the Palmer method, making various tweaks to it to create the D’Nealian script. Thurber wanted to make learning both print and cursive writing easier, and he argued that previous instruction styles and scripts made the transition between print to cursive more difficult, as there were substantial changes in the way the letters were taught. Therefore, Thurber created the D’Nelian script with the goal of using standards for print and cursive that would make the transition between the two writing forms easier.

It isn’t clear that the D’Nealian genuinely facilitates the learning of print and cursive writing styles, as a research review was done in 1993 by Prof. of Literacy at Vanderbilt University Stephen Graham found little to no evidence that D’Nealian script actually made the learning of writing easier or children’s writing noticeably better.

Cursive is being challenged as a legitimate way to allocate limited school instruction time in recent years, as the increasing adoption of digital communication methods and keyboards have made cursive unnecessary according to some.

Is Cursive Writing Still Relevant?

While the proliferation of digital communication has called the practicality of cursive into question, this isn’t the first time in history that cursive’s utility has been challenged. Different technological improvements over the years have also challenged the necessity of cursive writing, including the invention of the ballpoint pen.

One of the primary reasons for learning to use cursive, or so it is often said, is that writing with ink quills was simpler when using a cursive writing style. When writing in cursive, the quill did not need to be lifted and re-dipped in ink as often as when writing in print, as the act of lifting the quill would cause the ink to dry quicker. As ballpoint pens became easier to produce and more reliable, cursive’s utility began to decline. This decline in usage was also contributed to by later inventions such as the typewriter, as well as the computer and the computer keyboard.

Through the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, cursive was widely taught and was the dominant method of writing. In the years since then, many educational analysts, scientists, and teachers have argued that teaching cursive is a waste of limited instruction time, especially given the increasing proportion of communication done digitally in the 21st century. Various studies have suggested that cursive’s use is on the decline. As far back as 2007, a study at the time found that although 90% of all third-graders and around half of second-graders in the US were taught in cursive, only some 15% of high school students would answer their SATs in a cursive. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, school districts in states like Indiana and Hawaii have ceased mandating cursive instruction in their school curriculums, replacing them with keyboard proficiency and digital communication instruction to reflects the growing usage of these technologies.

The Common Core standards of education leave the instruction of cursive up to individual states and school districts, making no mandate about cursive instruction. Individual states get to determine if teaching cursive is worth their time, and many states in the US have decided against it. One report released by the Miami-Dade public school system found that school districts across the country have been slowly but surely ceasing cursive instruction. This trend even seems to apply to other countries, as Finland has also recently elected to stop the mandated teaching of cursive.

Those who still argue for teaching cursive in schools claim that cursive is still relevant to history and communication, making the argument that many important historical documents are written in various types of cursive, and without training in cursive future historians will be able to appreciate these documents in the form that they were written. This is one reason that some historians and teachers argue for the preservation of cursive instruction in school curriculums. However, though historians may have a use for learning cursive, the rest of society may not need to. Counter-arguments to cursive’s utility say that most people living in the 21st century will not need to learn cursive.

Other arguments for the preservation of cursive in school curriculums state that learning cursive makes the handwriting of students better, encouraging legible and clear writing and communication. It has even been argued that learning cursive makes students superior writers and readers on the whole, able to process written material more efficiently and write quicker. Some studies seem to support the idea that writing notes by hand, in comparison to taking notes on computer, engenders superior recall and comprehension of material. There also seems to be some credible evidence that teaching cursive could enable students with language disabilities such as dyslexia read and write better.

Yet it isn’t entirely obvious that writing in cursive is the phenomenon responsible for improved recall or comprehension of material. It could be that simply the act of writing material down, of writing out words in any physical format rather than a digital format, is responsible for increased material comprehension.

Those in favor of dropping cursive from school curriculums respond to claims of cursive’s benefits with arguments that there is little evidence which supports the notion that cursive genuinely enhances one’s reading or writing abilities. In addition, it is argued that reported benefits of writing in cursive may simply be an example of confirmation bias, that the improvements in reading and writing may come from other phenomenon and are simply attributed to cursive. Another criticism is that studies which claimed to find associations between enhanced material recall and cursive writing have been either misrepresented or misinterpreted.

No matter how you feel about cursive instruction in schools, if you personally are interested in writing in cursive, you need to practice it daily until you have mastered the letters. Start by obtaining list of all cursive characters, both lowercase and uppercase characters, and keep practicing them until you can write them perfectly without error.