No, so that fewer people see your ‘signature’ and this reduces the chances of fraud being perpetrated against you.
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Our valedictorian at our parochial grade school was (still is I imagine 
) a lefty. His writing technique was unusual compared to others I’ve seen. His left forearm and almost the entirety of his left hand were positioned above the line he was writing along, and he held his pen between his thumb and index finger. He’d been writing that way since the 1st grade. (I know that because we were in the same grade and our little school had only eight classrooms, so our class grew up together.) His technique afforded him a full unobstructed view of what he was writing on any single line. Neat solution. Smart dude became a tenured prof of Chinese Literature at Columbia University.
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When I lived in Japan my legal “signature” was a unique, hand-carved amber seal bearing my English surname interpreted into Japanese characters.
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Former Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew sure took that idea and ran with it. And his signature is now extremely widespread:
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We have a similar class in law school.
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So, doctors, lawyers, and philosophers…
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And @GagHalfrunt owes you a Coke as well
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As someone who knows shorthand, and uses it daily for work, I still often have that exact same problem.
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pre-script-ion. Very good. 
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Teaching two totally separate lettering systems, “block printing” and cursive, is a massive waste of time for students and teachers. Plus Palmer cursive is ugly when written in ballpoint, and is based on writing that was meant for variable width split nib pens. Plus the cursive capitals are ridiculous and often don’t resemble the letters they are supposed to be.
A better system is to teach handwriting once, as separate letters, then as a connectable running hand, such as Getty-Dubay handwriting.
https://handwritingsuccess.com/italic-handwriting-series/
This makes for a nice legible running hand, and you only have to teach the letter forms once. Plus the capitals actually look like regular Roman printed capitals.
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That’s a fascinating read - thanks.
Frankfurt has to be one of the most illegible mainstream fonts ever created. The thought of reading any volume of texts written in it just fills me with dread.
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I’m not sure I get the US (‘traditionalist’ / authoritarian) obsession re “cursive”.
Over here, I was only ever asked to do “handwriting” and as long as it was legible that was fine. I remember at secondary school, everyone’s handwriting was different. Everyone I know has different handwriting.
Is that (“handwriting”) what the alternative is to what (as far as I can work out) is just a highly prescribed, regimented style of italic handwriting? Jeez - just teach kids how to use pens to write legibly.
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I block print like a failed comic-book letterer.
If I think what I am doing when trying to write my signature, it is game over for me. The best I can do then is to try to forge my own john-henry-hancock. It is neither consistent nor pretty.
Regarding Cursive Writing, my dear, departed mother used to write like an ECG Machine; a carrier line with occasional, rapid fluctuations. It was legible if I knew what she might have been writing.
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Where clear handwriting is proscribed rather than prescribed?
@anon29537550 I remember hearing of a doctor who decided to use folksie names for ailments rather than scientific one, to put their patients at easy. They gave up following the response they got from telling a very macho dockworker that leaning on cold concrete had given him “housemaids’ knee”.
@MrShiv Working in the Pensions Department, I once saw a Channel Islands’ Birth Certificate from during the Nazi occupation. It was really chilling seeing those creepy-ass fucking stamps up close.
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As a pediatrician, I have become very adept at avoiding medicalese in favor of “cutesy” sorts of terms. Viral upper respiratory infection becomes megaboogiosis schnozola, for example. No reason to be snotty about it! ()
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Some cursive are harder than others.
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Oh yeah, I was expecting to find a swastika or two among my mom’s documents, but it was still a “whoa” moment to see the nazi eagle stamps
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I learned to write first with “print” letters, then cursive. My cursive was legible but never pretty. Sometime in high school, when note taking during class lectures began to require more speed than cursive allowed, I started using a print-cursive hybrid that I still use today; it’s still not pretty, but very legible and efficient. My freshman comp instructor in college was shocked, just shocked, that several of us in the class did this.
While I don’t see anything particularly special about writing in cursive, I do think there is value in writing by hand, especially when learning something new. Anecdotally, I understand and retain new information better when I write notes or calculate with pen or pencil on paper than when I keyboard them, and I see the same pattern with my daughter, much as she dislikes it.
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