Manuscript instruction began for me in first grade, and my teacher encouraged our class to express our own ideas in writing. Our teacher held practice periods on letters only as long as necessary, and this put handwriting to work at once. These practice periods helped us learn the different shapes and strokes required.
Sometimes we used oversized pencils, but our teacher thought that ordinary-sized pencils were best, so we abandoned the oversized pencils quite soon. The lined paper we used had one-inch spaces between the lines, and lines of another color were smaller. These lines helped us write both capital and small letters.
Our teacher often wrote model letters on the chalkboard for us to practice, and she let us practice new letter shapes and words on the chalkboard before writing them on paper. The opportunity to watch our teacher write was important in learning manuscript writing, because they showed in clear, easy to follow strokes just how to write.
Each letter was made with exactly the same strokes in the same order every time it was written, and our teacher often used the same words to name the strokes for us. For example, I remember our teacher saying, as she made the letter “a” — “around and straight down,” in general, the curves, circles, and straight lines that made up the letters were made from the top down.
We were taught to hold the chalk or pencil in a way that fit our hand normally. No two children can hold a pencil or chalk exactly alike because some children have hands that are long, like mine, while other children have short, fat hands.
For manuscript writing the paper is placed vertically, and for cursive writing the paper is placed slanting to the left for right-handed people and to the right for left-handed people. We were told to sit up straight and squarely in our desks with both feet flat on the floor as we wrote.
Our class did not make the shift from manuscript writing to cursive writing until we had an above-average mastery of manuscript writing. The change for the class came in the third grade, and the shift was made gradually over a six-week period.
Learning cursive writing consisted of practicing individual letters, and each student practiced until he/she could make an exact copy of the letter shown on the chart, the chalkboard, or in the manual we used.
In the second half of third grade, we began to write stories and reports, and in this way, we made practical use of our writing skills. As in manuscript writing, our class learned the most about cursive writing by watching our teacher write well.
We watched to see how the paper was moved to give slant to the writing, learned which letters were made differently in cursive than in manuscript, learned how to make the joining strokes between letters, and were taught not to raise our pencils or fountain pens from the paper until an entire word was finished.
Just like the older kids in our school, I too learned to dot my i’s and cross my t’s and to write clearly in both manuscript and cursive.
