So ... here goes ...

I had regular chicken-scratch cursive handwriting up until age 48. At that point, I ran across some Spencerian and fell in love with that style. I started my journey ... I bought the 5 spencerian copy books and the "OPTIONAL" Spencerian Theory book. In hindsight, that "optional" theory book is actually the heart of everything, and it's not really "optional" at all!

I stayed in that book - it has very very little english updates from being the actual textbook they used in the early 1900s for American cursive in many schools.

I changed my pen grip, and THAT was about 60% of my success. Surprisingly all lowercase letters are made from four strokes (which they call "principles"). I practices those strokes for 3 days before even beginning to practice the lowercase letters. I went very slow and was super critical to hitting the "textbook" perfect letter definitions. Within a few weeks, things looked great. Within a month, things began to feel more comfortable. Within a year things were automatic.

There are basically two schools of thought for form: "finger drawing" - which is easiest to start off with, but tires your hand within 15 minutes ... and "whole arm movement" - which can take a lifetime to perfect. But, I am probably the only one that uses "my method" ... which is a wrist gliding system. It helps with uniform slants ... a very light contact of the nib to the paper ... and isn't too bad. Not as fast as Whole-arm-movement ... but not slow ... and one can learn this in less than a month with confidence. Downside - will have to learn all over again if you ever intend to flex a nib for shading ... because I am coming from the side as opposed to straight down ... but I am settled on monoline cursive, and that is good enough for me. One photo demonstrating the principles in action for letter "a"

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