Business Cursive - a not so calligraphic guide
Disclaimer: I am not a calligrapher, or self-proclaimed master of handwriting or such title, but over the last 4 years I’ve managed to change my handwriting to what you’re seeing here, I know a thing or two. All the instructions and tips are available down below, so feel free to save the whole webpage down or save photos to your phone for personal references.
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there is a date on the left, and the writing on the right was probably around 2017…I do cringe looking at these old pages from time to time…
Things to note:
You don’t need the notebook featured below to start practicing: the page is slanted at a 55deg angle and the size of each line is pretty much depends on how big you would like your writing to be, my personal height for the miniscules are about 2mm.
You don’t need a fancy pen to start writing beautifully: a pretty common misconception is that buying good pens makes your handwriting look better. A pencil and a piece of paper is way more than enough to start scribbling.
You need patience - a lot of patience: writing by hand is essentially an activity that is really similar to classical conditioning: meaning you have trained yourself with the previous style of writing already, so changing that is really hard.
From the photo above, we can safely say that the script we produce also depends a lot on the broadness of the pen; with finer pen tips you could add a lot more details and flourishing to fill in the gaps, but for broader pens I tend to simplify the letters to make it easier on the eye, also to take less time to write. The choice is yours, so experiment and see what changes you can add to make the writing your own.
For our purpose of practicing and improving our letters, I suggest you use a fine tip pen to write, as the thinner strokes show more of the rough edges of your writing, and it would let you see clearly which letters to improve in the next session.
these 3 exercises right here are pretty much the most basic part of the script, so a few lines of these everyday will drastically improve your progress and your control over the pen and the letter forms you create, especially with this hand, it really emphasizes on the parallel of the letters and the straight-ness of the lines
There are also other exercises in this video so take your time to control the pen, get to know the shoulder movements and try not to move your fingers.
These images are from the GC Greene Manual from iampeth.com / check that website out, there are a lot of things we can learn from calligraphy and apply into our handwriting. This is also my grip when it comes to fountain pen.
The photo on the right really shows how you “should” be sitting to be able to write comfortably. It will definitely be strange at first as we tend to slouch a bit, but straightening our chest and shoulder will open up the range of motion of our arm, thus it would make creating similar strokes less stressful.
The alphabet
Miniscules
The small normal letters make up about 95% of your page., so mastering them alone would pretty much set you up in terms of using the business cursive hand in everyday writing.
All of the miniscules are pretty much comprised of the 3 basic drills shown above. Take your time and make sure upstrokes are a bit lighter while downstrokes should have a bit more weight.
Capitals
Right, now come the big letters, the basic movements are pretty much similar, with a bigger radius and longer stroke length. These letters make up like 1/10 the number of letters you would write on a daily basis, but since we are learning, might as well look at all of them, and there are a lot of letters that I do that are not true to form, so feel free to look at other exemplars for reference and make changes to your liking.
Numbers
I am not the best at writing numbers, as unlike most asians, I’m not very good at math myself, but here are the numbers:
Overall, it’s not the end of the world if your handwriting isn’t as good as others, but it’s always a blast when you see others’ smiles when they receive one of your handwritten letters. I hope this is useful and feel free to look around the website. If you have any questions, please give me a dm over @awritingguy on instagram, or an email to awritingguy@gmail.com.
