The Curse of Cursive

Can you write in cursive? Chances are you can. You may or may not do it often, but you probably are able to write it and read it. 

I taught in California from 2004 through 2015. Since I taught 7th grade, I assumed my students had been taught to write cursive in elementary school. And they had been. However, many of them would deny every learning it, and most of them would say they couldn’t do it — or if they managed to do it, they told me I wouldn’t be able to read it. Truth told, I usually could read it better than their printing. In 7th grade we had no established handwriting curriculum, but all five of us English teachers believed in teaching cursive. Most of us required cursive writing for things like in-class essays (this is before students had computers in the classroom).  One teacher wrote in cursive on the board — some students could not read it. During the last couple of years I taught, we were told we could not “require” students to write in cursive.  

In 2010 Common Core standards were adopted by the United States Department of Education. Those standards did not mention handwriting at all. Common Core has since been dropped by or is dying out in many states. 

In 2016 fourteen states required cursive as part of their curriculum. Now, twenty-one states do. Here are those states:

Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia

Besides Delaware and Massachusetts, those states look to me to be conservative (or red) states. In a way it makes sense because cursive is not exactly progressive; it is more traditional.

Some states, like California, leave it up to the individual school districts whether or not to teach cursive. When I left teaching there in 2015, I believe it was taught in 3rd grade in my district.  Generally, in the states that teach it, cursive is taught between 3rd and 5th grades. Some states expect competency by 5th grade. I began to learn cursive in 2nd grade in Massachusetts back in the Dark Ages.

Why is there a controversy about cursive at all? We teach kids to print. And now, just about everything is done on a computer anyway. Isn’t keyboarding a more important skill to learn?

Opinions range on the usefulness of cursive. Some teachers say it is a thing of the past, and there are more important things to teach in a packed curriculum. Some say that cursive should be taught, as well as keyboarding; all the skills are necessary.

Aside from the obvious uses of cursive, like being able to sign a check (who uses checks anymore?) and being able to read original documents like The Declaration of Independence, there are several advantages to learning and using cursive:

• Many studies have shown that writing in cursive improves comprehension and retention of the material written.
• Learning how to join letters in a continuous flow engages the brain on a deep level.
• Writing cursive enhances fine motor dexterity.
• Cursive gives children a better idea of how words work in combination with each other. 
• College students who took notes on a laptop took more notes, often verbatim from the professor. Students who used cursive paraphrased what was said and had better recall of their notes.
• Cursive is advantageous to dyslexic students who can get confused by printed letters that look similar, like b and d, whereas cursive letters all look different. 

My personal opinion of cursive is – I love it. When I scribble something on my grocery list that hangs on the fridge, I use cursive. (Yeah, I know. I could just ask Alexa to add something to my list.) But when I neatly copy my list over again (because I am a Virgo), I will likely print. I am the secretary of two boards, so I need to take copious notes at board meetings. If it is a Zoom meeting, my computer is already occupied, so I can’t type the notes anyway, but it is much faster and much more accurate if I use cursive, and I always do. I rarely have taken notes anyplace with a computer.  And when I go to a conference — usually made up of authors and people in publishing — the number of  plain old paper notebooks always outweighs the number of laptops. 

Call me a Luddite. And proud of it.