Italic Unlooped Cursive

Characteristics

Origin	Renaissance Italy; modern revival in the US and UK
Era	16th century; 20th-century revival
Region	US, UK, Australia
Slant	consistent right slant
Loops	none
Lead-in strokes	none
Joins	diagonal joins, unjoined and joined forms nearly identical
Taught today	italic handwriting programmes

Rendered in Playwrite IT Moderna, the closest available approximation; instructional labels are generic descriptors, not curriculum brands.

Italic unlooped cursive is the modern handwriting form of the Renaissance chancery hand: slanted oval letters, no loops, and short diagonal joins that leave the joined and unjoined letters looking almost the same.

Letterforms

The letters are built on a narrow, slightly slanted oval rather than a circle, which gives the hand its rhythm. Ascenders and descenders are plain, without loops. The lowercase a, d, g and q share the same oval, entered from the top; b, p and the stems are straight. Capitals are simple, often close to print capitals with a slight slant. The letters look the same whether written separately or joined, which is the model's main teaching advantage.

Joins and lifts

Joins are short diagonals from the exit of one letter to the entry of the next, and they are optional: a writer may join every letter, some, or none, and the words look right either way. Letters that end at the top, such as o and v, take a short horizontal join. Lifts after descenders and before capitals are normal.

Where it comes from

The chancery italic of sixteenth-century Italian scribes, printed in the writing manuals of Arrighi and his followers and revived as a school hand in the twentieth century in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. It is taught as an alternative to looped cursive by programmes that value legibility and a short learning curve, and many adults adopt it when relearning handwriting for the same reasons.

Practising it

The worksheet generator renders this model in an italic school face. The adult worksheets offer it as one of three faces, and it is the model the cursive for adults guide recommends for relearning. Practise the oval first, then the letters built on it, then the diagonal join between two ovals.

Frequently asked questions

Is italic cursive the same as italic type?

They share an ancestor. Italic type was cut in Venice in 1501 to imitate the chancery hand of the papal scribes, and italic handwriting is that hand taught as a model. The type is uniform and the hand is not, but the slanted oval and the unlooped ascenders are the same in both.

Why choose an unlooped model over a looped one?

Because the joined and unjoined letters look alike, so a child does not learn one alphabet for printing and another for cursive, and because loops are the part of looped cursive that most often goes wrong. The cost is that fully joined italic is a little slower than a looped hand at speed, which is why joins in italic are optional.

Is italic cursive good for adults relearning handwriting?

Yes. Most adult hands have already drifted toward it, with loops dropped and joins left out where they slow the pen, so italic makes those habits deliberate rather than treating them as errors. The adult worksheets print the model on 3/8-inch rules with sign-offs and passages.