Yeah, as someone who taught themselves Palmer script [0] in high school, I learned that it can only really be written fast if you have a fountain pen (which made me buy a cheap fountain pen), and that it's hard to write block letters using one. It's easier to accurately trace the shapes of cursive using a ballpoint pen, but because you have to press down a lot more to get a solid line on the page, you're forced to write more slowly.
I think something like Getty-Dubay Italic [1][2] is more appropriate for pencils and ballpoint pens, and for teaching children to write. It's also a more basic script than cursive. The primary thing is learning the basic shapes that make up most lowercase/minuscule letters.
To me thats a strange take. Letters that flow into eachother make it easier to write IMO. To
Me it’s a bit similar to just using a keyboard and taking the hand off the keyboard to fuss with the mouse.
Easier to write maybe (when I take notes just for myself I use a messy mix of cursive and print that no one else could read) but I think it's harder to read, especially for wide audience.
Depends on what you optimize for I suppose.
I absolutely despite printed out text in cursive font. There is no purpose, it tries to look cute but is just hard to read.
With fountain pens, ink flows out steadily as long as the nib is in contact with the page, and stops flowing when the nib breaks contact. Whereas with ballpoint pens, pressure is required for the ink to flow, since the ballpoint is held in place by a small spring, and ink stops flowing as soon as pressure is removed, regardless of contact with the page.
Hence, ballpoints tend to cause wrist strain, and favour forms of handwriting which minimize contact with the page, whereas fountain pens work best with cursive. Needless to say, since the introduction of the ballpoint in schools, handwriting has gone into decline.
I use fountain pens to write and (very occasionally) dip pens to do drawing/inking, but I haven't used quills so I can't speak to them.
There's a continuum between ink just spilling out and ink needing to be pressed onto the page. To me, the feel and flow of writing/ink from a graphite pencil (where I need to literally rub a mark onto the page with friction) to a rollerball pen (where I'm dragging around a ball bearing) to a fountain pen where the ink (ideally) goes onto the page with zero pressure or friction just through gravity and capillary action -- I feel like it results in very different writing experiences.
A fountain pen isn't at risk of just spilling ink onto the page; especially with a thin nib you can do very controlled small strokes, the extra precision there is part of what makes fountain pens nice to use. But it feels optimized for continuous, longer strokes. It's "wetter"; every time you lift the pen you're cutting off the flow of ink, as opposed to a rollerball where as soon as you stop moving the ink stops flowing because the ink is only flowing through the motion of the ball bearing. You can write in block letters with a fountain pen, it's fine. You can do very beautiful writing and scripts that way. But imo when using a fountain pen writing in cursive feels better than writing in block letters in a way that does not translate to graphite pencils or cheaper pens.
I can only speak for myself, but for me cursive with a fountain pen is also just much, much faster than with other writing instruments, because when you need to apply pressure to write on the page that lends itself to short controlled strokes, but when you don't need any pressure at all to write on the page then everything is just about the motion and you can do that motion very quickly with very little exertion.
I don't know the history, but it would not surprise me that cursive would at least be somewhat correlated with writing instruments that use gravity and capillary action to write as opposed to friction. It's not something I would make a strong claim about, but... yeah, I could see it, that matches my experience. I write almost universally in cursive unless for some reason I'm forced to use a pencil: and then I switch back to block lettering.
But :shrug: people do write cursive with pencils, so maybe that's just subjective.
This is a nonsense take; look at historical scripts like uncial or Carolingian miniscule, which were written with quills and definitely involve lifting the pen, often multiple times per letter.
They should teach good handwriting, and not worry so much about having letters that have to flow into each other.