What's "cursive"?

The Handwriting Is on the Wall

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

I haven't written in cursive since early high school, I think, at which point a drafting class had me convinced that printing was not only more legible, but at least as easy to perform.

Nowadays, my most frequent use of a pen is to sign my name on credit card slips.