Playwrite US Modern Guides

Which handwriting do American children learn? Nobody can say for sure. There is no national approach, and private companies sell the programs schools use, so the handwriting expert Kate Gladstone could only name the most widespread ones: Zaner-Bloser and D’Nealian in the traditional style, plus Handwriting Without Tears. Modern cursive is catching on as well, through Getty-Dubay and Barchowsky Fluent Hand, in classrooms and with adults who want to fix their own writing.

Veronika Burian and José Scaglione drew the US Modern model for TypeTogether’s Playwrite project, which grew out of Primarium, a study of the handwriting models taught in primary schools around the world. This version adds the guides. Every letter sits on its own ruled band with baseline, x-height, ascender and descender lines, and the underscore prints only the lines, 1 word space wide, so a row of them gives the learner an empty line to copy onto.

We’d print it large for small hands and use the plain Playwrite US Modern for anything that is not practice. It has 1 Regular weight and no italic or bold, so leave the B and I buttons alone, and switch on contextual alternates in Word to get the letters joining.