What's the proper way to handwrite a lowercase letter A? [closed]
There were two ways of writing the letter A, as seen in figure 1 and figure 2. I'm a non-native English speaker and I was explicitly taught to write figure 2 by my Irish teacher. However, on computers and fonts, I've almost never seen figure 2 actually used. In real life I notice about 75% of people use figure 2.
I tried to google more on the subject, but google never understands my search properly, like "correct way of writing lowercase letter a"
So is there a correct way to write lowercase A? Which one is it? Which version do they teach in schools in English countries? What about non-English countries who teach English as a second language? How did such a large difference even develop?
To answer your question simply: The proper (or at least normal) way to write "a" in handwriting is to write it "ɑ" without the arc above the loop.
The two ways to write lower-case a are called double-storey A (a) and single-storey A (ɑ). Single-storey is used for italics in most fonts. But why are there two different As?
Back in ye olde days there were many ways to write a lower-case A. (The same went for other letters, for example þ was later written "y", hence "ye olde days".) After a while there were two emerging winners: a and ɑ. One won the handwriting competition, and the other won the printing competition. And so it has been ever since.
Sources:
- A: Typographic_variants
- Styles of the Lowercase "a"
- Why Are There 2 Ways to Write the Lowercase Letter ‘A’?
Note that all my sources are second-hand/Wikipedia, so take them with a grain of salt.
Setting aside the question of "proper," you can get a clear idea of what is taught (at least in the US) by googling, e.g., "alphabet line" or "alphabet strip for classroom" (the model letters put up in classrooms). I believe every one of the images that came up for me has some form of the OP's version 2 for a printed a.
(At some point as an adult I switched over to the other a (fig. 1), perhaps thinking there was less chance of my a being mistaken for an o.)