Write Now: A Complete Self-teaching Program for Better Handwriting

My handwriting's still nothing to, um, write home about but it really has improved a lot with this book. I've only done the first section of exercises and haven't had time to get to the rest, but I like the practice format and the clear examples and how the authors incorporate some very interesting historical information about orthography and writing systems from around the world. It certainly makes the practice process entertaining and educational.

I used this book and in 13 days I saw a great deal of improvement in my hand writing

I have five sons. The only one of the older ones who never uses joined-up writing is the one to whom I taught looped cursive, before I learned of italic. The other 4 learned Italic through the Getty-Dubay series and are often complimented on their nice penhand.
A K-9 charter school we started here in the Rocky Mountain states finally switched over to Getty-Dubay Italic and the improvement in the children's penhand has been noticed by everyone.
Looped cursive programs do not offer the content and historical background that the G-D series does. In every book children learn about the history of letters, learn about grammar, poetry, history, geography. It is a very complete program and also VERY FAIRLY priced. I usually have my sons do a book more than once and it is affordable to do that as each book is less than $7.
Most children create a form of italic on their own, and abandon looped cursive methods as soon as they are allowed to. It makes sense to teach them the real thing - a single program, an italic method that will leave them with good printing and legible joined letters.
The gentleman who complained about being abused by teachers for his penmanship was really someone who had bad teachers. . . not someone who was taught a bad penmanship method!!!!! Bad, stupid teachers don't make a program or system bad.

Get just one of these books (book E, F, G) and review it yourself.

All people have a right to their own opinions on handwriting, Those opinions need to follow fact, not falsehood. Even though I love, use, and teach Italic with this book and others like it (you notice I gave it five stars), I do agree with Mr. Harvey that his teachers made a big mistake if they said what he remembers them saying.

No teacher should misinform students about the legal acceptability of a handwriting style. If one considers a handwriting system "snake oil" because some teachers don't know their subject well enough to avoid misinformation, then one must likewise call conventional cursive instruction "snake oil" because elementary schoolteachers in most cursive programs routinely misinform students that one cannot legally sign a check or other document unless one uses cursive.
(Though many people hold that belief, attorneys have informed me that in fact no law requires cursive for signatures on checks or anywhere else.)

Mr. Harvey's Chicago teachers acted just as badly as his teachers in Redmond. Shock, repulsion, and ridicule offered in response to
handwriting will, indeed, scar the writer: whatever handwriting program he or she has learned. If young Jake's family had moved in the opposite direction - from Chicago to Redmond - at least some teachers and students in his new school would probably have treated him just as despicably and would have left him feeling just as bad about having acquired a conventional cursive script as he in fact feels about once having acquired cursive Italic.
Schoolchildren in particular will abuse others (particularly new students) for any reason or none: ought we then to judge a curriculum by the taunts of children?

Re:
"I was ridiculed by my classmates for writing like a 'baby', and being
'illiterate.' ... "
I've never known a baby or an illiterate who could write in any kind
of handwriting.

Re:
" ... I had to learn how to write, all over again."
If young Harvey had moved to another country instead of to another state, he would have had to learn to write (and to speak) all over again. No teacher worth her chalk-dust would have felt "shocked and repulsed" by needing to teach him to do this.
If he had moved to Greece instead of to Illinois, would he regret that he had learned English before learning Greek? Would he deem his previous language "snake oil" as he deems his previous handwriting?

(And I do have to wonder: What did Jake Harvey's parents think of the
whole thing? What he has written reads as if he had to fight his scribal
battles alone. If his parents stood idly by, then they must accept at least
some responsibility for the scars he blames on a handwriting textbook.)

Re:
"To this day, a few scars remain. Some of the capital letters I still write in the Italic way. I do not loop some of my lower case letters."
Mr. Harvey should take courage from the research done in 1998 by handwriting/literacy researcher Steve Graham at Vanderbilt University. This research shows that people who avoid lower-case letter loops and conventional cursive-style capitals (which Italic also avoids) write faster and more legibly than those who follow "cursive writing" styles in their entirety.

Re:
"I encourage you to look at a sample of Cursive Italic writing before
you try this, although you probably won't have much luck searching for
this dead style on the internet."
Google thinks otherwise.
Searching for "cursive italic" yielded a Getty-Dubay web-page as the
first result, and a page of cursive Italic writing-samples as the
second result, on the first page of Google hits. So much for deadness.
I printed out those samples today, and showed them to some accomplished cursive writers. They liked what they saw. A number of them (including two schoolteachers) said they want to write that way too, and declared that they will order the book.

Re:
"It looks positively childish. It is printed letters randomly connected by serifs [i.e., joins] in awkward places."
If Mr. Harvey finds the connections "random," then he didn't pay much attention to his Italic lessons back in Redmond.
I admit that some (not all) users of Italic or other handwriting programs find some (not all) of the connections awkward. Italic handwriting programs that I know of (unlike conventional handwriting programs in USA classrooms during the 1980s or now) permit omitting those joins that feel awkward to a given writer.
If young Harvey or his Redmond teacher did not take advantage of the
opportunity to omit joins "in awkward places" when using Getty-Dubay, they had the opportunity nevertheless; one cannot blame a textbook for providing advice and suggestions that one ignores.

Re:
"When I learned to write normal cursive, I couldn't believe how natural and free-flowing it was. Cursive Italic requires you to stop and lift your pen to add unnatural serifs [joins?], despite the author's claims."

I trust that Mr. Harvey writes legibly as well as "naturally." A great deal of the "natural, free-flowing" cursive handwriting out there defies any attempt to read it.
If Mr. Harvey finds conventional cursive so "natural and free-flowing," why doesn't he write entirely in that way? Why does he still have bits of Italic in his handwriting, if he finds Italic so much harder to do than what he learned later?

What Mr. Harvey says about having to "stop and lift your pen" to add
serifs or joins confirms my opinion that he may have had a rather poor
teacher! Perhaps this could account, at least in part, for his Chicago
schoolmates' and teachers' shock and revulsion.
If he had written his Italic as well as everyone else I've seen who had this program either in childhood or later on, I doubt that his writing would have
appeared babyish or illiterate to teachers and schoolmates in Chicago or anywhere else. Google the phrase "cursive italic" and you will find numerous samples that appear (to me and to others, as I've said) far from babyish.
Certainly the teachers might have felt a need to teach him a new style, if the school or district required one - but learning a new style does not have to mean despising the old.

Re:
"With regular handwriting, you only stop to cross t's and dot i's (which Cursive Italic does not eliminate)."
Good for Chicago, if the cursive that Jake Harvey learned there lets you stop to cross "t"s and dot "i"s in the manner that Italic handwriting does not eliminate (namely: stopping within the word to cross and dot). Most people still teaching cursive (after some fashion) in the USA forbid stopping to cross and dot, requiring writers instead to go backwards after finishing the word in order to crosseach "t" and "x," dot each "i" and "j" well after writing
these letters, before one can finally go forward to reach the place where the next word will begin.

Mr. Harvey closes by warning us to avoid Italic. I wish he had explained how other people reviewing this book have ended up with good, rather than bad, handwriting from such "snake oil" as he calls it.

FYI, this print is currently not available from Amazon. Amazon *does* have another print of this book - just re-search on the same title, and look for the other printing with a publish date of March 2005 (and a bit less attractive cover, IMHO!).

I've heard this book is great, but haven't yet seen it. If my opinion is different after my book comes in, then I'll come back and update this review (or write a new one on the new print).