Seyes Ruled Paper for Cursive Writing

These days, Naomi, our intrepid 6-year-old middle child, is learning cursive writing, and so I’m back into it as well. What fun!

We have broken out our seyes ruled notebooks and sharpened our pencils and she’s even practising her writing with her Kakuno. You can see what seyes ruled paper we have in the shop here. With Clairefontaine, from France, their regular seyes ruled paper is with blue lines, but Naomi and I are practising on the slightly larger version of the ruling.

I thought I would share some basic guidelines for writing on seyes ruled paper, which is a French thing, and slightly different from “American” cursive writing. Once upon a time, when I was manning the 906 Dundas West shop, our very first tiny shop, a French expat came in to browse. She was amazed to find seyes paper in Toronto, and I have a distinct memory of her describing how she felt her writing was sliding all over the paper, out of control, without these additional guide lines for her cursive.

Alas for me, even with these guide lines, I’m doing some slipping and sliding, but we do the best we can in life.

The biggest group of lower case letters are the one spacers.

Very closely aligned to the one-spacers are the ones with tails that go down two spaces.

Letters with stamps go up three spaces.

With the exception of d and t, which only go up two.

And the extra special f.

Here are some warm up circles, which are great for getting used to the different heights of the spacing.

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Along with other existential quandaries, one can wonder whether or not children are still being taught cursive, whether or not cursive is still important, whether or not writing by hand is necessary at all. Some cultures value writing by hand more than others, seeing it as a reflection of discipline and art, but we all live in this world of increasingly present technology.

There is only so much time one has on hand for our over-programmed children, and yet this is actually a practice that I think helps us all slow down a bit. Our pencils tediously, methodically, carefully making their way across a page, our fountain pen nibs touching the paper with precision, our brain neurons firing a little less chaotically as we focus on the loops and the dips and the tactile feel of the pen moving around. Doing something with our hands and creating something physical does something different to our minds and our bodies after a long day of screens.

Maybe we are practising our scripts while listening to a podcast, or taking our time with entries into a journal. Maybe we are painstakingly writing out our spelling words, our tiny brains blossoming into this world.