Handwriting guide
A reference guide to cursive handwriting instruction, written for teachers, parents and adult learners. Free worksheets are linked throughout.
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The main cursive handwriting styles taught in English-speaking schools are Zaner-Bloser, D'Nealian, the Palmer Method, Handwriting Without Tears and the ornamental Spencerian script. They differ mainly in slant, letter shape and how print transitions into cursive: Zaner-Bloser teaches vertical print and a separate cursive alphabet, while D'Nealian teaches slanted print with exit tails so the same letterforms convert into cursive with minimal relearning.
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Handwriting Guide
Cursive is not a single alphabet. Several distinct instructional systems — sometimes called penmanship methods — have been taught in English-speaking schools, and they differ in letter shapes, slant, entry strokes and how print transitions into cursive. This guide compares the major styles and explains which one a learner is most likely to encounter.
In depth
| Style | Introduced | Slant | Defining characteristic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zaner-Bloser | 1895 | Vertical print, slanted cursive | Simple ball-and-stick print, with a separate traditional cursive alphabet learned later |
| Palmer Method | c. 1894 | Moderate forward slant | Plain, fast, business hand taught with whole-arm movement |
| D'Nealian | 1978 | Consistent forward slant | Slanted print with exit tails, designed so print converts to cursive with minimal relearning |
| Handwriting Without Tears | 1977 | Vertical | Simplified vertical letterforms and a distinctive double-line paper rather than four-line ruling |
| Spencerian | c. 1840s | Pronounced forward slant | Ornamental oval-based script with shaded strokes; calligraphic rather than a classroom method |
Zaner-Bloser is the most widely recognised traditional American handwriting programme. Its print alphabet uses vertical 'ball and stick' letterforms built from circles and straight lines, which are easy for young children to produce. Its cursive alphabet is separate and conventional, with looped ascenders and a clear forward slant. The trade-off is that print and cursive are effectively two different alphabets, so the transition requires genuine relearning.
D'Nealian, developed by Donald Thurber and introduced in 1978, was designed specifically to solve that transition problem. Its print letters are already slanted and already end in a small exit tail, so converting a printed letter to a cursive one is largely a matter of joining the existing tail to the next letter. Critics note the slanted print is harder for very young children to form than vertical ball-and-stick shapes; supporters note the transition to cursive is far smoother.
The Palmer Method, developed by Austin Palmer, stripped the ornamental flourishes out of nineteenth-century script to produce a plain, rapid business hand. It was taught with movement driven from the whole arm rather than the fingers, and dominated American classrooms for much of the first half of the twentieth century. It is rarely taught as a named programme today, but modern classroom cursive is essentially descended from it.
Handwriting Without Tears uses simplified vertical letterforms and a distinctive two-line paper instead of the conventional four-line system, on the argument that fewer reference lines reduce cognitive load for beginners. It is widely used in occupational-therapy settings and with learners who have fine-motor difficulties.
Spencerian script is an ornamental style from the mid-nineteenth century, built on oval forms with deliberate thick-and-thin shading produced by pen pressure. It is beautiful but slow, and it is best understood as calligraphy rather than as a handwriting method for everyday writing. Learners looking for a practical hand should not start here.
The five systems above are the American classroom tradition. Cursive is taught differently elsewhere:
None of these regional variants is more "correct" than the American systems above — the differences reflect different national curricula, not competing claims about the best way to form letters.
Spencerian, developed by Platt Rogers Spencer starting in the 1840s, was the dominant American hand through the Civil War era — an ornamental, oval-based script meant to be beautiful as much as functional. By the 1890s, business demand for faster writing pushed Austin Palmer to strip out Spencerian's shading and ornamentation, producing the plainer, quicker Palmer Method (c. 1894), which became the default American classroom hand for the next half-century. Zaner-Bloser followed in 1895 as a closely related system built around a similar plain, forward-slanted cursive, paired with its own vertical ball-and-stick print alphabet. Both came under sustained pressure through the twentieth century as classroom instruction time shrank, and in 1977-78 two very different responses arrived within a year of each other: Handwriting Without Tears simplified letterforms and page ruling for learners who struggled with fine motor control, while D'Nealian redesigned the print alphabet itself to make the eventual cursive transition smoother. Cursive instruction time then dropped sharply in many US states through the 2000s as curricula prioritised keyboarding, followed by a partial, mandate-driven revival from the mid-2010s onward — see why cursive is coming back for that more recent shift.
There is no single official count. "Four types of cursive" is a common shorthand because most American classroom instruction descends from four named systems — Palmer, Zaner-Bloser, D'Nealian and Handwriting Without Tears — with Spencerian usually mentioned separately as the older, ornamental style those four all reacted against. Beyond these named, published programmes, most adult handwriting is really a personal variant shaped by whichever named system a given school happened to teach, so "how many styles" depends on whether the question means named published systems (a handful) or individual handwriting variation (effectively unlimited). This page covers the five named systems that account for nearly everything taught in English-speaking schools.
Both are traditional, non-ornamental classroom hands, and modern Zaner-Bloser cursive is a direct descendant of Palmer. The practical difference is in how the print stage is taught: Zaner-Bloser's print alphabet is upright "ball and stick," built from separate circles and lines, while Palmer was taught as a continuous, whole-arm movement from the start, print included. A learner taught with Zaner-Bloser's print alphabet experiences a bigger jump into cursive than one taught under Palmer's continuous-movement approach, since Zaner-Bloser's print and cursive are more distinct from each other.
D'Nealian was designed specifically to fix the problem Zaner-Bloser has and Palmer does not: an abrupt jump from print to cursive. D'Nealian's print letters are already slanted with a small exit tail, so the cursive form is close to just joining those tails together — closer in spirit to Palmer's continuous-movement philosophy than to Zaner-Bloser's separated print and cursive alphabets, even though D'Nealian is the newer system (1978 vs Palmer's 1894).
Palmer exists specifically because Spencerian was considered too slow and too ornamental for ordinary business use. Spencerian's oval-based letterforms and pressure-shaded thick-and-thin strokes look elegant but take longer to produce and require a flexible-nib pen to shade properly; Palmer strips out the shading and ornamentation entirely, favouring plain, fast, uniform-width strokes suited to an ordinary pencil or ballpoint. A learner wanting practical, fast handwriting should learn Palmer-descended cursive; a learner wanting calligraphy should start with Spencerian and expect it to be a different skill, not a faster version of the same one.
The two sit at opposite ends of the simplicity spectrum. Zaner-Bloser keeps the traditional four-line ruling, a dashed midline, and conventional looped cursive letterforms; Handwriting Without Tears drops the midline entirely in favour of two-line paper and simplified letter shapes with fewer strokes per letter. Handwriting Without Tears is explicitly designed to reduce the number of decisions a beginner makes per letter, which is why it is common in occupational-therapy and special-education settings; Zaner-Bloser is the more traditional choice where a school wants cursive to look like conventional cursive from the start.
Both were introduced within a year of each other (1977 and 1978) as responses to the same problem — beginners struggling with the print-to-cursive jump — but they solve it differently. D'Nealian redesigns the print alphabet to already resemble cursive, so the transition is a matter of joining letters that already lean and already carry exit tails. Handwriting Without Tears instead simplifies the letterforms and the page ruling themselves, reducing the number of strokes and reference lines a beginner has to track, and keeps print vertical rather than pre-slanting it. A child who struggles with fine motor control tends to do better with Handwriting Without Tears' fewer, simpler strokes; a child who is already print-fluent and just needs an easier bridge to cursive tends to do better with D'Nealian.
Given a sample of cursive handwriting or an old worksheet, a few letterforms give the style away faster than the whole alphabet:
The right style depends on who is learning and why, not on which system is objectively "best":
For most learners the answer is: whichever style the school already teaches, because consistency between home and classroom matters more than the merits of any particular alphabet. If there is no school constraint, D'Nealian-style letterforms are the pragmatic default, because the print-to-cursive transition is the stage where most learners stall.
The worksheets on cursivewritingsheets.com use conventional modern cursive letterforms with looped ascenders and a consistent forward slant — compatible with Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian cursive instruction, and adjustable for slant-neutral practice by changing line height and script mode. Start with beginner letter worksheets, or read the underlying cursive writing rules that all these styles share.
Whichever alphabet is taught, the underlying rules do not change: letters rest on a baseline, x-height letters stop at the midline, slant is applied uniformly, and letters within a word join through the exit stroke of one letter into the entry stroke of the next. A learner who understands those four rules can adapt to any of the styles above.
There is no official list, but "four types of cursive" usually refers to Palmer, Zaner-Bloser, D'Nealian and Handwriting Without Tears — the four named systems behind most modern classroom cursive instruction. Spencerian is typically counted as a fifth, older, ornamental style rather than one of the four, since it predates and is stylistically distinct from all of them.
Modern Zaner-Bloser cursive descends from Palmer, and the two look similar in the cursive alphabet itself. The real difference is earlier: Zaner-Bloser teaches an upright, ball-and-stick print alphabet first, making the jump to cursive bigger, while Palmer was taught as one continuous whole-arm movement from print onward, with a smaller jump into cursive.
No — D'Nealian is a print alphabet (slanted, with small exit tails) that is specifically designed to transition easily into a separate D'Nealian cursive alphabet. The print and cursive forms share the same slant and tails, which is what makes the changeover easier than in systems like Zaner-Bloser, where print and cursive look more different from each other.
D'Nealian is generally considered easiest specifically for the print-to-cursive transition, since its print letters already carry the slant and exit tails cursive needs. For learning cursive on its own with no print-transition concern, the specific named style matters much less than consistent practice — see the site's full learning progression for what actually predicts success.
Spencerian is a specific ornamental cursive style from the 1840s, not cursive in general. It is closer to calligraphy than to the plain, fast cursive taught in modern schools (Palmer, Zaner-Bloser, D'Nealian) — it uses pressure-shaded strokes and a flexible-nib pen, and takes considerably longer to produce than a modern classroom hand.
In practice, most adult handwriting already is a mix — few people write in a textbook-pure version of any one named system once they've been writing for years. For a learner still forming habits, though, sticking to one style's letterforms until they're automatic, then adapting from there, produces faster progress than switching between systems early.
Getty-Dubay Italic is a simplified, slanted italic script developed by Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay, used in some US and international schools as an alternative to the loop-heavy Palmer-descended styles. Its letters are narrower and less ornamented, and can be written joined or unjoined depending on the writer's speed.
The letterforms are broadly similar to Palmer-descended American cursive, but UK schools typically teach continuous joined-up writing from the start rather than print-then-cursive, and there is no single national standard — schools choose from commercial schemes like Nelson Handwriting or Letter-join rather than following one codified system the way American schools follow Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian.
There's no single national figure, but Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian remain the two most commonly taught systems in US schools that still teach cursive, with Handwriting Without Tears widely used in early grades and occupational-therapy settings. State-level cursive mandates that have reappeared since the mid-2010s generally require that cursive be taught, not which named system to use, so the choice is usually made at the school or district level.
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