Nan Jay Barchowsky: Hi, I am Nan Jay Barchowsky, Handwriting Specialist, here to help you with your handwriting.

I am just doodling a little bit with some patterns. Patterns that you saw in the other clips are the same ones that will help you with your conventional cursive and it is conventional cursive that we are addressing now.

That is the sort of writing that demands that you join every letter and every word, works pretty well in a short word, but it doesnt work too well with a long word with the way most of us now hold our pencils and pen use it on our paper. For this pattern, I couldnt possibly maybe if I were better but I couldnt possibly write all those es having the heel of my hand on the paper, which is what most of us write.

In the 19th Century, they held the pencils pretty much the same, but only these two fingers were allowed to write on the paper. So you have whole arm movement and you can see that it would be very easy to follow those es with whole arm movement. Not so easy when its down like this. This is what happens if you are trying to write, you are dragging the heel of your hand, you are trying to correct the shape and its going out and the heel of your hand is digging into the paper and its distorting the pattern that you are trying to do.

This is my recommendation for improving conventional cursive. We are taught a rule, I am sure you were taught a rule to join every single letter in every word and I am going to tell you to disobey that rule. If you will look at the downstrokes which are dark here, there is just a little lift up, a lift up, and a downstroke, downstroke, downstroke, downstroke, downstroke and actually a lift to get up to here to make this downstroke, downstroke, downstroke, downstroke, downstroke and a t. Stop here, cross your t and go into the I. This allows the heel of your hand to be a little more relaxed, and not to dig into the paper. I will show you a little bit more about what happens in the next clip, and I will try to correct some of the errors that happen with handwriting.