Playwrite GB S Guides

English classrooms lean toward modern cursives. A 2013 guide from the National Handwriting Association described 23 teaching methods, and 13 of them were joined or semi-joined, Nelson, Jarman, Marion Richardson and Sassoon-Williams among them. Most of that line goes back to Alfred Fairbank, who in the early 20th century argued for a modern italic hand built on chancery models, simpler and quicker to write. Playwrite England SemiJoined is TypeTogether’s version of the English school hand, and this Guides font is the same writing printed on top of its own ruling.

Every letter carries lines for the baseline, the x-height, the ascenders and the descenders, so a child copying a word can see where each stroke has to start and where it stops. The underscore is the clever bit. Type it and you get only the guidelines, as wide as a word space, which lets a teacher run empty practice rows after a model word without ruling anything by hand.

Veronika Burian and José Scaglione built the Playwrite system on Primarium, a survey of the handwriting models primary schools teach around the world. In font menus this one appears as Playwrite GB S, GB for the country and S for SemiJoined. You get a Regular and an Italic and no bold, and pressing B in a word processor will only produce a smeared fake, so don’t.

For Word users: turn on Contextual Alternates under Font, then Advanced, or the letters will sit there unjoined.