Do Signatures Have To Be In Cursive? (Clarified, In 2 Min)

You’re probably in this situation.

• You’re about to sign something
• You’ve seen plenty of signatures that look like the ones below
• You have no idea whether they need to look like that or not

We’ve asked government officials, lawyers, bureaucrats, and academic professors: does your signature have to be in cursive for it to be valid?

The short answer is this: Wet ink signatures are likely to be cursive, but no, your signature does not have to be in cursive for it to be 100% legal — eSignatures can not be in cursive. But there’s more to it… what matters then, if not whether it’s in cursive?

Let’s dive deeper.

Wet ink signature? What’s that?

We’ve written an in-depth analysis of how wet ink signatures are different from other types of signatures.

The short of it is this:

• If you draw your signature on a piece of paper, that’s usually called a “wet ink signature”.
• If you create your signature online, that’s usually called an “electronic signature”.
• However, a wet ink signature can become an electronic signature, if you use it with a properly-built, 100% secure eSignature software such as SignHouse.

Need to know more on this topic? Check out our no-BS analysis here: Wet ink signatures VS eSignatures.

What makes a signature?

It all depends on whether we’re talking about a digital or physical document.

Physical documents

On a physical document, a signature’s validity is given by how close it is to the “original” signature.

How you decide which one is the original one — that could be down to resorting to expert service, in legal courts.

As you can imagine, esoteric knowledge is needed by those 3rd parties.

Not to mention a reputation in the industry.

Digital documents

On the other hands, the digital realm presents a couple of advantages:

• Signatures are 10x easier to be attributed
• As per the eSignature (2000) and UETA (2000) Acts passed by the US Government, alongside other requirements (explained in-depth by us here), one of them is this: “Attribution. The signature has to be uniquely identified to the signee and only linked to them”
• Using an electronic signature software such as SignHouse automatically handles that, as such apps easily attribute signatures with identifiable details (e.g. account information, location, IP, etc)
• Another requirement for a digital signature to be valid: “Retention. The documents must be stored for future reference, available to be viewed, reviewed, edited, etc. by both parties”
• SignHouse takes care of this aspect as well.

Conclusion: Do signatures have to be in cursive?

So… why did we relate to you these bits of information?

What was the point of comparing physical docs signatures vs digital docs sigantures?

It all ties in together now: if you’re electronically signing, you can understand now why your signature doesn’t have to be in cursive at all. Cursive or not, that’s not what defines its validity.

However, on the other hand, on a physical document, you might want to use cursive, as it makes the signature more… valid, so to speak.

What we mean by that: your signature will be harder to replicate, thus making it more bulletproof.

The short answer we started from was that it doesn’t have to be in cursive. And we’re still at the same conclusion. But on a physical document you might want to write it in cursive.

But on a digital document?

No need for all that.