Why Cursive?
• Cursive handwriting aids left to right movement through words and across the page, while developing natural spacing between words.
• It develops a motor memory for spelling words, thus improving spelling accuracy.
• It helps prevent letter reversals.
• It permits greater writing fluency and speed.
• Words can be learnt as whole writing units with a continuous line through the whole word.
 
Why Print to Cursive?
• It aids writers who form letters correctly but have never learned to join.
• It permits the writer to see the connection between print and its cursive form, thus helping learners who find cursive writing difficult to read.
• Writing patterns of common words and letter strings are practised to develop rhythm and flow.
• The simplicity of the joining system does not require any memory of which letters join and how.
Guiding principles
• Two lines identify the mid-zone of all letter formation.
• Lower case letters start on the bottom line of the mid-zone with a diagonal line to the top line of the mid-zone.
• All letter join at the top of the mod-zone except for the letter ‘e’. In its cursive form the diagonal approach stroke becomes an intrinsic part of the cursive ‘e’.
• Capital letters start above the mid-zone and do not join.
• Letters are practised one at a time then added to letters already learnt, providing structure, cumulation and overlearning.
• Words incorporated in the scheme are generally high frequency or decodable: learners are not blindly forming words they cannot read.
Methodology
There are three stages to practising each letter or word –
1. Trace over the cursive form of the letter or word
2. Add in the joining lines and trace over the print version of the letter or word.
3. Try forming the cursive letters/words without tracing.
It is recommended that learners are encouraged to read letters/words aloud as they are formed. One page a day is a good rate to incorporate sufficient practice as is necessary to make cursive writing as fluent and easy as the printed version it will replace.
Print To Cursive can assist adult learners to join in a neat script thus alleviating manybad habits formed over the years