In Defense of Keeping Cursive in the Classroom
Why Cursive Handwriting is Still Relevant
If you read my Scantron article, you may remember that the increasing use of technology in classrooms was threatening to edge out the old way of test-taking. This week, technology takes on a new opponent in our schools: cursive. As computers become more available in more schools, penmanship in general falls by the wayside. Critics of cursive argue that it is a style of writing that is rarely used anymore – when handwriting is used at all – either in higher education or in the workplace. Furthermore, it isn’t necessarily any more legible than printing. On the other hand, educators fear that dismissing cursive from the curriculum will broaden the educational gap between students of different socioeconomic standing – once again, students who cannot afford computers get the short end of the stick.
Master penman and author Michael Sull is more concerned with students’ abilities to read cursive than their ability to write it. Sull points out that many very important historical documents, such as the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, are written in cursive. If we remove cursive from education, we remove future generations’ ability to decipher old texts in their original form.
This old friend may be disappearing soon.
Sull’s argument is the one that I personally find the most compelling. I hated learning cursive. For me, trying to write in cursive still makes me feel like I’ve completely lost control of my right hand. The last time I used cursive was for the honesty statement on the GRE, and by the end of that incredibly obnoxious paragraph I was just making random loops and squiggles. But! But. Whenever I so much as see a printout of a page from the journal of some long-ago writer, I feel a rush of excitement. The thrill of the intimacy created by reading that person’s words exactly as they were written all those years ago cannot be matched.
So yes, it is important to look toward the future, but it is also important to have access to the past. Instead of finding ways to cut corners and teach kids less, let’s teach them everything and let them decide what’s important to keep later. We won’t know what they’re going to build until their older and wiser, so we can’t be stingy with the tools we give them along the way. Allow me to officially cast my vote for keeping cursive in the curriculum. Besides, if I had to hunch over a page for hours painstakingly trying to achieve even a semi-legible result, so should the fourth graders of today, and tomorrow, and the next day. Sorry kids. It’s time to put down the iPad, pick up a pencil, and practice your cursive!
I’ve decided to copy my Facebook post to my friends here, with readers of your story. Here we go:
“I conformed in grade school, mostly. I practiced my penmanship faithfully. Math? Please, let’s skip that! Penmanship? Loved it!
I remember our sixth grade teacher, Sister Jamesetta, being especially strict with helping us perfect our penmanship. Of course, by sixth grade, we all already knew cursive. But…she believed our individual penmanship was truly a reflection of what was inside of us, and that when we wrote something in our own hand, it was a sign to the world about the kind of persons we were.
She taught us that good penmanship was a matter of pride; better than choosing the perfect clothing or the day’s makeup – in part, not only because of the day-to-day impressions, but also because there would be writings we might leave behind someday that people we would wish to know (our great-great-grandchildren, for example) would see, and our particular individual handwriting might be the only thing for them to cherish about us.
Sister Jamesetta would have us draw successive interlocking figures of “O” and other things, over and over and over again until we could perfect the simple shape with precision and our minds could grasp what was required to produce an even flow, the right pressure on the paper, and a favorable looking result.
Really, in her class, it was almost like a SPORT. I mean…you have to have quite a bit of mental dexterity to discern how to best apply a variety of writing instruments correctly to the wide variety of beautiful papers that are out there, and with the right pressure and with the correct “flow”. Can you believe how much I’ve gone on about cursive?! Wish I knew how to contact Sister Jamesetta…and I hope she’s still around.”
Sister Jamesetta sounds like an amazing teacher! Donna, I bet your penmanship is flawless to this day! Thank you so much for sharing such a wonderful story, and giving us all something important to think about next time we’re writing by hand.
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The fastest, clearest handwriters join only some letters: making the easiest joins, skipping others, using print-like forms of letters whose cursive and printed forms disagree. (Sources below.)
Reading cursive matters, but even children can be taught to read writing that they are not taught to produce. Reading cursive can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds, once they read ordinary print. (In fact, now there’s even an iPad app to teach how: named. “Read Cursive,” of course.) So why not simply teach children to read cursive. — along with teaching other vital skills, including some handwriting style that’s actually typical of effective handwriters?
Adults increasingly abandon cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority, 55 percent, wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive. When most handwriting teachers shun cursive, why mandate it?
Cursive’s cheerleaders sometimes allege that cursive makes you smarter, makes you graceful, adds brain cells, or confers other blessings no more prevalent among cursive users than elsewhere. Some claim research support, citing studies that consistently prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far — in this article, this thread, and elsewhere — whenever a devotee of cursive has claimed the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident when others examine the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim (of research support for cursive) provides no traceablew source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, it is misquoted or is incorrectly described (e.g., an Indiana University research study comparing print-writing with keyboarding is usually misrepresented by cursive’s defenders as a study “comparing print-writing with cursive”),
or
/3/ the claimant _correctly_ quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
What about signatures? In state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
All writing, not just cursive, is individual — just as all writing involves fine motor skills. That is why, six months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from print-writing on unsigned work) which student produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
http://youtu.be/3kmJc3BCu5g
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
http://youtu.be/s_F7FqCe6To
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
http://youtu.be/Od7PGzEHbu0
[AUTHOR BIO: Kate Gladstone is the founder of Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works and the director of the World Handwriting Contest]
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Thank you for sharing – and for providing some excellent sources! I wonder if those who write in a hybrid of cursive and printing would still have developed this style without having been exposed to cursive writing in school?
You mention teaching students “some handwriting style that’s actually typical of effective handwriters” – I’d love to learn more about this! What qualifies someone as an “effective” handwriter – and where can I learn this style? I’ll be the first to admit that my handwriting could use some help!
Well, all I know is: I was taught your signature was your identity. We were told to make it as individual as possible and learn to write as consistent as you could on all documents ( this would firstly identify you alone as the signer, and secondly keep others from effectively forging your identity). We still require people to sign and get it validated…
To print our names as signatures seem doomed to fail as a way to stylize a unique scripted identity.
This always seems to me to be the wrong argument. It’s not so much that we should keep cursive writing but that we should defend teaching handwriting at all and defending one aspect of writing so tenaciously risks losing the wider battle.
Most forms of writing developed some sort of cursive version. People just wanted to write faster and making the letters flow onto one another was a way of doing that.
The trouble was that school teachers got hold of the idea and turned a means into an end. Instead of just allowing letters to join when it helped and not when it didn’t there a came into being a style of writing in which every letter in every word had to be joined by sometimes the most tortuous and confusing ligatures. Possibly the worst example of this kind of mistreatment of writing and writers is the American Spencerian hand. It doesn’t even look attractive with its pointless loops and those weird boat shaped additions to the bottom of some of the capitals.
It would be a shame if the only purpose of cursive writing, legibility at speed, were lost because of an insistence on an outdated and actually useless method.
You make an excellent point, Sapphire, about preserving the goals of cursive rather than the style itself. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, and you put it beautifully!
For more info on this issue there will be a panel on cursive writing in schools at the upcoming American Handwriting Analysis foundation conference.
http://m.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-handwriting-analysis-foundation-conference-highlights-national-cursive-writing-issue-223543281.html
Because the world would be a poorer place if Gentian Osman and Leigh Reyes had never learned cursive. Because cursive is idiosyncratic. Because cursive internalizes and makes visible to young minds the union of sound and meaning like block printing never can and never will. Because block printing, i.e. handwriting instruction in general, is next up on the altar of progress. Because cursive (and other forms of handwriting) affords at least the possibility of private communication and memorialization in an age of sweeping intrusion. Because connectivity is not required to communicate cursively. Because history is never fixed when it can be disappeared wholesale down the binary memory hole. Because forging, altering, or otherwise attempting to rewrite history in others’ unique hands is far more easily detected and understood by the non-technorati than is digital manipulation of bits and bytes. Because cursive is good for the soul.