Personally, I tend to use a combination of printing and cursive when I'm handwriting. Generally, when I print, I tend to write in all caps, too. I probably do most of my handwriting in church, taking notes on sermons. I'll generally print, all in caps, for the major points and then use my stilted cursive, upper and lower case, for the subpoints.

I do still occasionally write a letter by hand, and when I do is probably the only time I print in both upper and lower case any more. My personal brand of cursive can pretty much only be read by me, and I have even had occasions where I've gone back and had to "figger out" what it was I had written. My printing, on the other hand, is very legible, so I tend to use it more when I want to make sure that somebody else will be able to read what I've written. I write in cursive when I have to write quickly, as in a meeting or when taking notes, etc.

If you're basing what's best on what is the fastest, then typing on a keyboard wins, hands down. I'm just guessing, but it probably would have taken me two or three times as long to write these three paragraphs out by hand as it did to type them in, even using cursive.

Grishny