There’s been a big debate at work recently and that is how do you write a cursive capital A. The split is pretty much half half.
This first spawned as a discussion about different cultures and it lead to languages and finally until the fact that everyone at Microsoft likes to write in print more than write in cursive. Cursive to me has always been a note-taking/fast writing skill. For something final, I always thought print is easier to read and nicer as a final product. I also prefer print. I’d learnt cursive back in 3rd grade and only seldom use it. Ruchi says that cursive was the first thing she learnt when taught how to write English, so that’s why she was shocked that so few Americans she’s met actually use cursive.
Anyway, she started drawing the cursive letters on my whiteboard, both upper and lower case. I said there’s a few differences between our cursive vs their cursive and the 1st thing I pointed out was that our capital A looked like this:
Instead of this:
Both Dan and Ruchi started cracking up and couldn’t believe it. They said that the capital cursive ‘A’ could never be just an enlargement of the lower case cursive ‘a’. I didn’t find it particularly funny and even pointed out the fact that her capital ‘C’, ‘P’, and ‘M’ were also just enlargements of lower case ‘c’, ‘p’, and ‘m’. They seemingly ignored that fact and continue to argue that capital cursive is suppose to be beautification process and my capital ‘A’ was had nothing beautiful about it.
So we brought up Wikipedia’s entry on Cursive and of course I was right. They still deny that fact and said Wikipedia is mainly Americans, which I don’t deny. I did find an entry on Russian Cursive, and their A does indeed look like what Ruchi and Dan had drawn.
Anyway, I started asking around, especially people from different countries, to see how they were taught their cursive A and so far as noted before, it’s pretty much split.
Both Bo and Jan Lyk (Australian) remembers learning the American cursive ‘A’.
This was even brought up during one of our team meetings once and the disagreement gets even further. Luke agrees with me and says the A that Ruchi and Dan drew is actually script, and not cursive. I even got both Brazilians on our team to agree with my A. I forget if it was Mark, but I believe we got a Canadian to agree with my ‘A’ too.
However, apparently not all American’s learnt ‘A’ like we did as John also agrees with Ruchi and Dan.
Here’s the current tally:
My ‘A’:
- Toland
- Jan Lyk
- Bo
- Brian
- Caleb
- Luke
- Robert
- Rafael
- Airam
- Mark
Ruchi and Dan’s ‘A’:
- Ruchi
- Dan
- John
- Tariq
- Brent
- Vijay
- Shan
- Jaideep
So far we have what I believe Canada, Australia, Brazil, and a majority of U.S.A against Russia and India. If you’re from a different country, I’d like to know how you write your cursive capital A.
