D'Nealian vs Zaner-Bloser: Handwriting Styles

Four things separate the mainstream American handwriting styles, and only four things: whether the print alphabet stands upright or slants, whether print letters end in a small exit tail, whether a letter is built from one continuous stroke or from separate strokes with pencil lifts, and how many letters have to change shape when the child moves to cursive. Everything else in a curriculum catalog is packaging. If you know where a style sits on those four questions, you can match it, teach it, or replace it.

Where each style sits

Zaner-Bloser(R) is the older of the two systems that most American adults were taught from. It was developed around 1904 by Charles P. Zaner and Elmer W. Bloser at the Zanerian College of Penmanship in Columbus, Ohio, and its print alphabet uses straight vertical strokes, with letters written “straight up and down in print” from circles and lines, the construction traditionally nicknamed ball and stick. Its cursive alphabet, by contrast, is slanted (Wikipedia: Zaner-Bloser teaching script). The publisher today sells a K to 6 program built around “4 Simple strokes” and “4 Keys to Legibility” that students use to self-assess (Zaner-Bloser Handwriting).

D’Nealian(R) was created by Donald Neal Thurber, a Michigan elementary teacher, between 1965 and 1978, and introduced publicly in 1978. Its whole design argument is continuity into cursive. The print letters slant, at 85 degrees measured counterclockwise from the baseline, and that slant “does not change at all” between the print and cursive forms. Print letters carry small curved exit strokes, sometimes called monkey tails, which act as a bridging step toward joined writing, and by this account thirteen letters change shape at the transition (Wikipedia: D’Nealian). Thurber’s own 1975 paper was titled D’Nealian Manuscript: A Continuous Stroke Print, which tells you what he thought the important difference was.

Handwriting Without Tears(R) is the newest of the three in wide use. It was created by occupational therapist Jan Olsen, and the publisher, Learning Without Tears, describes it as multisensory explicit instruction in print and cursive for TK to grade 6 (lwtears.com). Its manuscript alphabet is vertical rather than slanted, and it is usually the style an OT reaches for first. The paper format and the capitals-first teaching order it is known for are widely reported but were not stated on the publisher pages I could reach, so treat those details as secondhand.

The comparison, on the four questions that matter

Question	Vertical ball and stick	Slanted continuous print	OT style vertical print
Print slant	Upright	Slanted, cited as 85 degrees	Upright
Exit strokes on print letters	None	Yes, small curved tails	None
Letter construction	Separate circle and line strokes, pencil lifts	One continuous stroke where possible	Simple strokes, all starting at the top
Cursive transition	More letters change; cursive is learned as a new alphabet	Fewer letters change; slant already matches	Cursive taught as its own stage
Usual argument for it	Print letters look like the letters in books	Less relearning later	Easiest motor start for young or struggling hands

The row that drives most of the arguing is the third one. A vertical ball and stick lowercase a is a circle plus a vertical line, two strokes and a lift. A continuous stroke a is one movement. For a five year old whose hand tires in ninety seconds, that is not a trivial difference. But the vertical camp answers that the letters a child meets in books are vertical, and that a slanted print alphabet asks a beginner to hold an angle at the same time as a shape.

There is a second, quieter tradeoff in the exit strokes. Tails make the print alphabet look more like cursive on the page, which is the selling point, but they add a stroke to every letter at exactly the stage when the child is still fighting for the basic shape. The British debate over lead-in strokes is a useful warning here, because it is the same mechanism running in the other direction. Angela Webb, writing for the National Handwriting Association, argues that teaching a baseline entry stroke as the default motor pattern backfires when a child then has to join out of letters that end at mid height: “the child will find it hard not to return to the line before making subsequent joining strokes (making o resemble a and v like u, for example),” and “having to learn exceptions to rules and unlearn the kinaesthetic patterns is both confusing and time consuming” (Continuous cursive: cure or curse?). Any extra stroke you attach to a letterform early is a stroke somebody has to manage later.

Does the style choice actually change outcomes

Less than the marketing implies, on the evidence that exists.

The question is old. Trap-Porter and colleagues published D’Nealian and Zaner-Bloser Manuscript Alphabets and Initial Transition to Cursive Handwriting in 1984, which is precisely the comparison every parent wants settled, but the publisher restricts the abstract and I could not read the findings, so I am not going to characterize them. Wikipedia’s D’Nealian article quotes a 1993 review by Sheehan and Graham concluding that “there is no credible evidence that D’Nealian makes a difference in children’s handwriting,” which is a strong claim resting here on a secondary summary rather than the review itself. Later work exists but is small: Shaw’s 2011 study in Early Childhood Education Journal compared D’Nealian against another approach on kindergarteners’ letter formations (doi:10.1007/s10643-011-0444-2).

The practical reading of a thin literature is this. No style has been shown to be the reason a child writes well or badly. Explicit instruction, correct stroke order, and enough practice are doing the work. Style consistency matters more than style identity, because a child who is taught a slanted a at school and drilled on an upright a at home is being asked to hold two motor programs for one letter.

What to do about it

Find out what the school actually uses before you buy or print anything. Ask for the name of the handwriting program, not just “do you teach cursive.” If the teacher does not know, ask to see a letter formation chart or a worksheet, and look at three letters: lowercase a, lowercase k, and the number of pencil lifts in lowercase d. Slanted with a tail, or upright without one, tells you everything you need.

If nothing is being used at school, choose by the hand in front of you. A young or fatigued or low-tone writer usually does better with an upright, simple-stroke print, because there is one less variable. A child who already forms print letters cleanly and is heading into cursive within a year loses less by starting slanted. State cursive mandates almost never specify a style, so the choice is genuinely yours in most districts; see is cursive still taught in schools for how to check yours.

Do not switch styles mid-year to fix messy writing. Switching resets the motor learning. If handwriting is deteriorating, the cause is far more often grip, posture, speed, or letter formation order than the alphabet’s slant. Work through why the alphabet is the wrong teaching order first.

For left-handers, slant is not a neutral choice. A right-slanting print alphabet is written toward the hand for a left-hander, which pushes toward hooking. Set the paper angle before you set the style, as in left-handed handwriting.

Decide print and cursive together, not separately. The whole continuity argument only pays off if cursive actually arrives. If your plan is print only through grade 5, the exit strokes buy you nothing. Print or cursive first sets out what the evidence supports.

Why we name our styles functionally

We describe the styles in the worksheet generator as traditional print, modern slant print, simplified block print, and continuous cursive. That is a deliberate choice on two grounds.

The legal one: Zaner-Bloser, D’Nealian, and Handwriting Without Tears are registered trademarks belonging to their publishers, and labeling a sheet with a brand name would imply we are supplying that curriculum. We are not.

The useful one: a functional name tells you what you will get on the page. “Modern slant print” says the letters slant and carry exit strokes. “Simplified block print” says upright, minimal strokes, no tails. “Traditional print” says upright with the familiar circle and line construction. You can pick correctly from the description without knowing any brand’s history, and you can match whatever the school is doing by looking at a worksheet rather than by looking at a logo. The letter pages show the formation for each style letter by letter, including the ones that give the most trouble such as a, k, and q.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reselling Zaner-Bloser(R), D’Nealian(R), or Handwriting Without Tears(R). Those are registered trademarks of their respective owners and are named here only to describe and compare the styles.