When I was in eighth grade, though, cursive handwriting was mandatory, and we didn't all have typewriters. (I hate to date myself like this, but the days of personal computers were still a ways off!) Everything turned in by hand had to be in cursive. My current handwriting is kind of a speed-print, but I can still write in cursive, obviously. Here's a sample:
Here's a sample of the same words written over a couple hundred years ago:
As you can see, there's quite a bit of similarity between the top paragraph, which is straight up my own handwriting (I'm only copying my own printing) and the writing on the second page, which I got off the Internet. The signature looks nothing like my own, however. It does, however, remind me of the signature of Sir William Penn (father of the more famous founder of Philadelphia), who has a lot in common with the guy who wrote the second page, Captain John Paul Jones.
I once actually had my dad read me a part of a letter Paul Jones once wrote and I wrote down what he was saying as he read it. Then I asked him, as a former teacher, if he thought the letter was written by the same person, keeping in mind the scrap he was reading from was written many years ago. He looked it over and said, yes, it was. I told him how old the letter was and he looked at me like I was playing some sort of trick on him. That being said, yes my handwriting is mostly sloppy, and I really only "speed print" these days, and if you look up letters by John Paul Jones on the Internet these days they were mainly written by a secretary. But I have to say when I first saw some of Paul Jones's actual handwriting I was pretty shocked at how similar it was to my own.
