Thought of the Day - Joined Up Writing

Do you remember early in school, you mechanically printed out line after line of individual letters to learn the shapes? Then one magical day your teacher let you join them up to form adult writing? Well when i was 14, i decided that my joined up writing was so illegible, that to have a chance of passing exams, i would have to start printing again. Not just printing, but printing in block capitals and that is the way i have written for the latter half of my life.

In fairness it has served me well, i learned to print quickly enough to get down the salient points in an exam in the requisite time. The printing was legible enough that i'm fairly sure that the examiner understood what i was getting at and i passed the large majority of exams. More recently due to the IT revolution, about the only thing of consequence that i have had to handwrite since university exams was an application to MI5 and even then i printed in block caps (which i'm sure annoyed them no end - graphology be damned!).

It shouldn't come as a surprise to me then, that i am now no longer capable of cursive script. Sure i can join up block capital letters pretty well and jot out individual lower case letters but i can't write like i should be able to. I can't avoid starting every letter with an full-size capital; Imagine Every Word In A Sentence Written Like This, only worse. Even more disturbingly i can't write lower case letters in a consistent fashion at all, i can scroll out a couple but as soon as i lose concentration i slip back into block caps.

I suppose there are two questions; in this increasingly digital world, should i care? and given that my cursive script was so bad back in the day, could i even write legibly in cursive with practice?