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Grammar

Why the Cursive Q No Longer Looks like a 2

A aqua-colored letter Q rendered in neonDeposit Photos

If you are of a certain age, you remember learning how to write in cursive. You probably remember something very strange about the cursive Q.

I’m not sure whether most schools teach cursive these days. I hear conflicting reports. But when I was in elementary school, we had to learn it. As we learned how to write each letter in cursive, both lowercase and uppercase, we spotted something weird about the cursive Q.

Back then, the uppercase Q didn’t look like a Q at all. It looked a lot like the number 2. I prepared a little graphic to demonstrate the difference between the way teachers taught us to do a cursive Q in the 1970s and how they now teach it:

The one on the left, of course, is roughly how we learned to make a Q in the cursive alphabet. It always bugged me that it looked so close to the number 2. Back then, they taught us to write that digit without the curl at the top or the bottom. But still, that looked like a 2, not a Q.

But in 1996, something changed. Zaner-Bloser, one of the most prominent publishers of handwriting texts, changed their Q. Prior to that, it resembled the one on the left. But after that, it looked more like the one on the right, although with a much shorter tail.

The reason for the change? Oddly enough, you can thank the U.S. Postal Service!

The postal service requested the change, as the story goes, because its sophisticated machinery wasn’t quite sophisticated enough. It misinterpreted that fancy Q for the actual number 2. In most cases, I imagine the context would make it clear which symbol the writer intended. But computers don’t generally worry about context; they look at what’s in front of them and proceed.

It’s just that these were proceeding incorrectly.

If you ever find yourself using cursive — and I occasionally do — you no longer have to worry about that goofy-looking Q. (Not that I figure anyone lost much sleep over it once they passed penmanship class.) You can now write it the way it makes sense…so that even a computer couldn’t screw it up!

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.