American cursive is an impractical "idealized" script. Some scholar a hundred years ago decided that handwriting would be faster if the pen never left the page, ever. As a result, American cursive is full of tiny hand-cramping loops and loses legibility.

With one exception, the capital I is unconnected. My teachers made me retake the cursive test every week for a year because I always tried to connect the capital I to the next letter, and it took that long before anyone told me which mistake I was making.

That must have been a distinct style, the version I learned does connect capital I to the next letter, while capital D/U/W doesn't unless it's a tall letter like lowercase l: https://sciencetrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/800px-C...

Yeah the American style is extremely ornate and traditional. The UK style is literally just print letters but joined up, nothing fancy.

ohhhhh I didn't know this. I've seen these complaints from Americans about cursive a million times and I never understood why writing with joined up letters was so hard.

I wrote a comment of my own and scrolled through 700 comments before I found this response. The whole debate has seemed incomprehensible to me, for the 20 years that I've been aware of it.