Don’t demote cursive handwriting skills
Somewhere out there another school administrator is working on a persuasive argument to curtail or eliminate cursive writing — using a keyboard, of course.
No doubt reasons abound to downgrade the painstaking ritual of learning how to construct those curlicues that, with practice, evolve into uppercase and lowercase letters.
Time is short, and teachers have many demands. Digital is the future. There is a keyboard or touchpad in every pocket.
But pencil this in: Cursive matters.
The art of handwriting is too exquisite to disappear. There will always be value in the handwritten card, the longhand journal and the scribbled notes in the margins.
A substantial body of research suggests that writing with pen and paper permits a more continuous flow of thoughts than keyboarding, which tends to create its own set of distractions.
Writing in longhand encourages creativity and recall. The teaching and practicing of cursive has cognitive benefits for young students.
Handwriting is a key to the personality, and a record of what the writer was experiencing at a given point in time. Smiley faces and computer emoticons are poor substitutes.
And if students are no longer taught to write in cursive, how will they learn to read it? Surely we wouldn’t deprive the newest generation of a history of handwritten notes and letters and documents.
The Kansas Board of Education spent much time discussing the demotion of cursive last week, and stated that, while it can’t compel school districts to teach handwriting, it strongly recommends it.
That’s as it should be. Keyboards and touchpads are the present and the future, but cursive is the connection to creativity.
Kate Gladstone
7 months agoHandwriting matters … But does cursive matter? Research shows: the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive. They join only some letters, not all of them: making the easiest joins, skipping the rest, and using print-like shapes for those letters whose cursive and printed shapes disagree. (Citations appear below) When following the rules doesn’t work as well as breaking them, it’s time to re-write and upgrade the rules. The discontinuance of cursive offers a great opportunity to teach some better-functioning form of handwriting that is actually closer to what the fastest, clearest handwriters do anyway. (There are indeed textbooks and curricula teaching handwriting this way. Cursive and printing are not the only choices.) Reading cursive still matters — this takes just 30 to 60 minutes to learn, and can be taught to a five- or six-year-old if the child knows how to read. The value of reading cursive is therefore no justification for writing it. (In other words, we could simply teach kids to read old-fashioned handwriting and save the year-and-a-half that are expected to be enough for teaching them to write that way too … not to mention the actually longer time it takes to teach someone to perform such writing well.) Remember, too: whatever your elementary school teacher may have been told by her elementary school teacher, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over signatures written in any other way. (Don’t take my word for this: talk to any attorney.)
CITATIONS:
/1/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HANDWRITING STYLE AND SPEED AND LEGIBILITY. 1998: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
and
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. DEVELOPMENT OF HANDWRITING SPEED AND LEGIBILITY IN GRADES 1-9. 1998: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
(NOTE: there are actually handwriting programs that teach this way. Shouldn’t there be more of them?)
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works and the World Handwriting Contest http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Carole Rule
6 months, 3 weeks agoScript writing, the mix of cursive and print comes after learning to write without having to think about how to make the letters. But the practice of penmanship has many advantages for a child among them motor control and impulse control. I have never figured out why we in the USA teach print first and then cursive, if taught at all, when the first and most natural movements children make are circular and connected. I understand most European countries teach cursive first and know one French educator has a good technique teaching movement away from a chalkboard then using the chalkboard and showing how easily short words can be made. It delight the children to see how a high loop and a short loop makes “le” and a short spike and tall spike make “it”. This sparks the interest at an early age. But like many thing in our world penmanship was considered unnecessary and dropped even though the practice was a form of impulse control and now even many of our teachers can not write in cursive. I have been writing cursive so long I find it hard to print so am at least teaching my grand children that yes they can read it if they just try and think about the shapes. Now at least one wants to learn cursive on her own.