Playwrite US Trad Guides

“Trad” is short for traditional, and in American handwriting that word points at the older school cursive of programs like Zaner-Bloser and D’Nealian. The United States never settled on 1 national model. Private publishers sell the methods, so a classroom in Ohio and one in Oregon may teach different letters, and the handwriting specialist Kate Gladstone admits the most common ones are hard to identify. Zaner-Bloser, D’Nealian and Handwriting Without Tears are among the widespread ones, while Getty-Dubay and Barchowsky Fluent Hand, both modern cursive, have been gaining ground with adults too.

This Guides version takes the Playwrite USA Traditional letters and sets them on ruled lines, baseline to ascender to descender, so a printed sheet already has the writing paper built in. An underscore prints the lines alone at word-space width.

1 Regular weight, by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione of TypeTogether, made from the Primarium research into how schools around the world teach writing. Switch on contextual alternates or nothing connects.