I used to teach English as a foreign language, and you could always tell the difference in the nationalities. I think it's because certain things are taught the same way in different countries or areas, and probably some university teacher made a big impression on his student teachers at some time in the past, and those teachers went out into the world and taught their students the way they were taught. It would be interesting to know exactly how those things developed, wouldn't it. Wouldn't it be great to be immortalized by your handwriting? No one might know exactly who started that style of handwriting, so your name wouldn't be known, but thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even more, people would be writing like you did, years after you were gone, living on in just that little thread of your culture. I think some people here in the States still like to emulate Franklin's style of writing.

Everyone here in the States used to be taught a certain cursive style, and over the years even that changes--the way I was taught was different from the way my mother was taught, and my daughter wasn't taught much at all! They were using computers and handwriting was just touched on briefly.

I think we charactize cursive as having all the letters connected together, and in printing the letters aren't connected. But it's hard to find examples nowadays, because it isn't so important in education any more.

Here's a listing of some fonts used in American schools--
http://my.execpc.com/~lindgren/page01.html

I think I was taught the learning curve style--about halfway down the page. But my mother and grandparents were taught the fancier styles, with more loops and curliques. In the older styles, a great effort was made to teach the students how to join the letters together so they wouldn't have to lift their pens off the paper. The more joined the letters were, the faster and easier it was supposed to be to write without lifting the pencil off the paper.

I taught English at the British Council in Cairo, Egypt for several years, and there was some discussion there about the height of the lower case letters, and the height of the ascenders on the h and k, etc--it wasn't a teaching point, just something that was discussed once in a while in the staff room, and I remember that most of the British teachers' handwriting was more in the style you might call joined printing.

It was so long ago I can't remember the details--maybe like the Victorian Modern Cursive style from near the bottom of that font list.

I like it, it looks simple and modern and easy, and I try to adopt it to some extent in my handwriting.

By the way, I wouldn't be concerned that someone said that European style isn't a "true" cursive--they'd say that about any style that isn't strictly joined together, American or European. I think you'd have to say that any style that doesn't join all the letters in a word together isn't really cursive, or isn't as good a cursive as possible. I remember being graded down in elementary school when I didn't join together every letter in every word. They spent a lot of time with special combinations of letters that were difficult to join, so we had to learn them specifically. Bless them, they thought my life would be easier if I learned to write the way they wanted.

I'm lefthanded, so some things were more difficult for me, and finally I had to just adapt and do the best I could and give up on perfection. Now I hold the paper at a perfect right angle with the writing line perpendicular to the edge of the desk, and my writing goes from the top of that line to the bottom. Just can't do it otherwise.

It reminds me of the Arabic Language professor in Cairo who told his class that we would all be going straight to hell, because we read and write from left to right. I remember thinking that I must be especially damned because of being left handed, but maybe I'd get off a little bit easier because at least I didn't write from left to right.

All of that emotional baggage is just the way some people have, if you don't do things their way, they don't see how you can live, or even have an afterlife!