A new handwriting modeling and segmentation approach is introduced for cursive letter and word analysis. For the letter analysis, the proposed method is based on the detection of a set of "perceptual anchorage points" to extract a priori pertinent strokes. This physical segmentation of the handwritten drawing enables us to conduct a logical modeling of letters with respect to the most stable strokes of each letter class. For the handwritten word analysis we present a constructive segmentation approach to overcome the word segmentation problem. The main idea is to locate "anchorage structures" in the word drawing based on the most robust strokes of the letters. This new approach of handwriting analysis has been implemented in a writer independent on-line handwriting recognition system. Experimental results are reported using a lexicon context of 1128, 7000 and 25000 words.