Handwriting curricula compared - D'Nealian, Zaner-Bloser, Getty-Dubay and more
Ask which handwriting curriculum is best and you will get confident answers pointing in every direction. Zaner-Bloser is the standard. D'Nealian makes cursive easier. Italic is the only style worth an adult's time. Handwriting Without Tears saved my struggling six-year-old.
All of these claims are held sincerely, and each curriculum genuinely does some things better than the others. What gets lost in the debate is a quieter truth: children learn to write well under every one of these systems, and children struggle under every one of them too. The curriculum matters less than consistent teaching and regular practice. But it does matter, because the choice shapes which letterforms a child spends years automating, and some of those choices are easier to live with than others.
This guide describes the major curricula honestly, what each one is actually like to teach and to learn, and how to choose between them for a classroom or a homeschool.
What a curriculum actually decides
Strip away the branding and a handwriting curriculum makes a small number of concrete decisions.
- The letterforms themselves: what an a looks like, where each stroke starts, whether letters are upright or slanted.
- The path from print to cursive: whether the two styles are close relatives or separate alphabets, and when the transition happens.
- Whether cursive has loops, and how letters join.
- The paper: how many guide lines, and what they mean.
- The teaching method: stroke descriptions, verbal cues, multisensory work, pacing.
Every comparison below comes back to these decisions. Keeping them in mind makes the differences between curricula much easier to see clearly.
Zaner-Bloser
Zaner-Bloser is the closest thing American handwriting has to a default. Its roots go back to the Zanerian College of Penmanship, founded in Ohio in 1888, and generations of American adults write a hand descended from its models whether they know it or not.
The system teaches two distinct alphabets. Children begin with vertical manuscript print: upright, round, deliberately plain letters. Then, usually in second or third grade, they learn the traditional looped cursive most people picture when they hear the word cursive. The two alphabets are related but genuinely different, and the transition is a real piece of work: entry strokes, exit strokes, loops, and joins all arrive at once.
That transition is the standard criticism of Zaner-Bloser, and it is a fair one. The counterargument is also fair: the plain vertical print closely matches the letters children see in books, which supports early reading, and the looped cursive connects them to the hand their parents and grandparents write. Modern editions have softened the old ball-and-stick approach in favour of continuous strokes, so manuscript letters are written with fewer pen lifts than they once were.
Choose Zaner-Bloser when you want the conventional American path, maximum familiarity for anyone helping the child, and print that looks like print in books.
D'Nealian
D'Nealian was created by Donald Neal Thurber, a Michigan primary teacher, and published in 1978 as a direct answer to the Zaner-Bloser transition problem. Its manuscript letters are slanted rather than vertical, written with continuous strokes, and most lowercase letters finish with a small upward tail.
Those tails are the whole idea. A D'Nealian manuscript letter is essentially a cursive letter waiting for its joins. When the transition to cursive comes, children mostly connect the letters they already write, and only a handful of letterforms change shape substantially. Where Zaner-Bloser asks children to learn a second alphabet, D'Nealian asks them to upgrade the first one.
The trade-offs run the other way. Slanted, tailed manuscript is a little harder to learn initially than plain vertical print, and it looks less like the letters in books. Some children produce a rather untidy intermediate style where the tails wander. And the research record, for what it is worth, has never shown a decisive advantage for either approach; the transition benefit is real but so is the earlier difficulty, and they appear to roughly trade off.
Choose D'Nealian when cursive is a firm destination and you want the gentlest road to it.
Getty-Dubay Italic
Getty-Dubay, developed by Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay in Portland in the late 1970s, takes a different view of the whole problem: it removes the second alphabet entirely.
The system teaches basic italic, a slightly slanted, elliptical print with clean and simple letterforms. Cursive italic is then the same alphabet with joins added. No loops, no new letter shapes, no relearning. The joins are short diagonal and horizontal connections, and the style permits sensible pen lifts rather than demanding unbroken connection through every word.
The result is a hand that many people find genuinely beautiful, and the style scales from a five-year-old's first letters to a polished adult hand without a break. This is why Getty-Dubay has a devoted following among homeschoolers, and why their adult self-instruction book, Write Now, is a standard recommendation for grown-ups repairing their handwriting.
The honest costs: it is a minority style in schools, so a child may write differently from classmates and teachers, and the elegance of italic depends on consistent slant and spacing, which takes maintenance. Handwriting that drifts loses its charm faster in italic than in rounder styles.
Choose Getty-Dubay for a homeschool that wants one coherent style for life, or for an adult learner starting fresh.
Handwriting Without Tears
Handwriting Without Tears, created by occupational therapist Jan Olsen and now published under the name Learning Without Tears, is the curriculum built most deliberately around how young children's hands and attention actually develop.
Its letters are vertical and stripped to essentials. Its paper is the most distinctive choice in the field: two lines rather than the usual three or four, on the theory that fewer lines mean fewer things to misjudge. The teaching method leans heavily on multisensory work, wooden pieces to build letters, writing in small chalk spaces, and consistent simple language for strokes, with a developmental sequence that respects which strokes small hands can actually make.
For young children, and especially for children who find writing difficult, this scaffolding genuinely helps, which is why the program is so widely used by occupational therapists. The criticisms are the mirror image of the strengths. The letterforms are plain to the point of blandness, the cursive is simplified and vertical rather than traditional, and the two-line paper means an eventual adjustment to the standard-ruled paper the rest of the world uses.
Choose Handwriting Without Tears for early years, for children who struggle with fine motor control, or when writing has already become a source of frustration and something needs to change.
The British schemes
British schools frame the question differently. The debate is less about brands and more about approach, and it centres on when joining should begin.
The National Curriculum requires children to learn the diagonal and horizontal strokes needed to join letters, but leaves schools free to choose how. Established schemes like Nelson Handwriting and PenPals teach print first, though usually a print with exit flicks that anticipates joining, with joins introduced progressively. Newer schemes such as Letter-join support the continuous cursive approach, in which children learn joined-style letterforms with entry and exit strokes from the very beginning, sometimes from Reception.
Continuous cursive from the start has passionate advocates, and the logic is the same as D'Nealian's taken further: never teach anything that has to be untaught. The reservations are also familiar: entry strokes are demanding for four- and five-year-olds still developing pencil control, and fully joined early writing can diverge confusingly from the print children are learning to read. Many schools have settled in the middle, with precursive print (flicks, no joins) in the early years and systematic joining from Year 2 or so.
If you are choosing for a child in a British school, the practical answer is almost always to match whatever scheme the school uses. Fighting the school's letterforms at home buys nothing but confusion.
The historical methods
Two names come up often enough to deserve a brief word. The Palmer Method dominated American classrooms in the early twentieth century, teaching a rhythmic business hand driven by whole-arm movement, and Spencerian script preceded it as the ornate standard of the nineteenth. Both are effectively retired from schools. Palmer's descendants live on inside Zaner-Bloser-style looped cursive, and Spencerian survives as a calligraphy pursuit rather than a curriculum. If you meet a modern program trading on either name, it is a revival, not a continuation.
How to choose
There is no ranking to give, because the right answer depends on the situation. But the scenarios sort themselves fairly cleanly.
- A child in school: use what the school uses. Reinforcement beats theoretical superiority every time, and no curriculum's advantages survive being contradicted at home.
- A homeschool wanting one style from first letters to adulthood: Getty-Dubay italic is the strongest candidate, precisely because it never asks for a second alphabet.
- A homeschool wanting the traditional American path: Zaner-Bloser, with D'Nealian as the alternative if the print-to-cursive transition worries you more than early simplicity does.
- A young child who struggles, or an early start: Handwriting Without Tears, with a planned move to standard paper later.
- An adult fixing their own hand: this is not really a curriculum decision at all. Italic via Write Now suits adults who want a fresh start; targeted repair of your existing style is usually faster. Our complete improvement guide covers that path.
Whatever you choose, commit to it. A year of consistent practice in any of these systems beats three years of switching between them. Most handwriting failure is inconsistency, not curriculum.
Matching practice sheets to your curriculum
Whichever direction you go, practice volume matters more than the workbook, and this is where a generator earns its keep. The worksheet generator includes fonts modelled on several school traditions: plain vertical print in the Zaner-Bloser spirit, precursive print with exit strokes, looped American-style school cursive, and school fonts from several national traditions, including French and German models. You can set the guide lines, size, and tracing style to match the stage your child is at, and generate as many pages as the week requires.
These print-ready sheets cover the main stages of the print-to-cursive path.
A–z Basic print with arrows
All 26 uppercase and lowercase print letters with arrows indicating stroke order, on four-line guides. Oversized letters, great for new learners of any age. One letter per row with tracing.
A-z - Pre-cursive
All 26 uppercase and lowercase pre-cursive slanted letters with exit strokes, on four-line guides. One letter per row with tracing.
A-z - Basic cursive
All 26 uppercase and lowercase cursive letters on four-line guides. One letter per row with dotted tracing.
Curricula are maps, and all of these maps lead somewhere worth going. Pick the one that fits your child and your setting, then stop comparing and start practising. The hand is built by the pages, not by the choice.