Part 2 - What’s So Special About Cursive?

If you’re my age, do you remember January in second grade? That’s when I learned cursive. It was thrilling! But by the time I was teaching second grade, cursive was gone. The era of teaching to the Ohio Fourth Grade Proficiency Test had begun.
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So what’s so special about cursive? Take a stroll down cursive’s timeline to see how it developed and why it might be coming back.
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                                                          My Sources: Who Invented Cursive? - Word Smarts
                                            Why Cursive Writing and Penmanship Is Important - Word Smarts


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                                                                            ​Part 2: Fastforward to Charlemagne and the Middle Ages

​Charlemagne, the King of the Franks and the Holy Roman Emperor, enters the cursive story sometime around 768 AD. He remains on the scene until 814 AD. AD means After the Death of Jesus Christ.
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Charlemagne wanted an English monk to standardize handwriting. Over the years the monks created the first standard form of cursive. Its name, Carolingian script or miniscule.

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Look below, and you’ll see an older example. Carolingian has lower-case letters. There’s separation between each word and even punctuation, but letters aren’t connected yet. Later versions of cursive will be based on Carolingian. 
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During the Middle Ages, parchment grew more expensive, so writers pushed letters and words close together.  Then in the 1400’s the printing press was created, and typeface grew dark and heavy.

By the time the Renaissance came along, people added twists and curls to their writing, making it difficult to read. As a result, people returned to Carolingian. 

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By the 1300s Italian humanism appeared. Did you notice the print is light and elegant? Its name, italic. 

The italics we read in books today looks like this… humanism arose from the study of ancient Greece and Rome, and it spread across western Europe. Interesting, the two fonts look a lot alike.
 
Tomorrow: Penmanship comes to the New World

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