by Lorinda K. F. Newton
A friend sent birthday cards to each of my children (ages 22 and 17) with handwritten notes. My son turned to me and said, “I can’t read this cursive.”
Picking up the card, I read the message. To be honest, my friend’s handwriting was difficult to read. I don’t blame her, though. She probably jotted her thoughts down quickly. It was sweet of her to remember my children’s birthdays and to even include a note in the snail-mailed cards, a tradition now much neglected.
I also stand accused of having poor handwriting, but not from the lack of use. I manually journal most days, but I don’t take the time and care to make my cursive look beautiful. As a fourth-grader, however, I had lovely handwriting due to my teacher’s requiring all her students to carefully copy poems to improve penmanship.
This emphasis on penmanship has waned over the decades. I hear that some teachers are in such a hurry to get children to write compositions that they offer minimal printing and keyboarding lessons. At most schools, cursive has been thrown out altogether, especially since Common Core doesn’t require it.
But was that a wise decision?
If you teach your children at home, weigh the pros and cons of each handwriting method. Don’t dismiss penmanship instruction because we live in the digital age. Handwriting, and cursive in particular, offers more benefits than simply getting words on a page.
History of Handwriting Instruction
Cursive, also known as script, began during the Roman empire. In the United States, children used to learn cursive first. Printing was introduced in high school for labeling maps, architectural drafts, and to fill out forms.
In the 1930s, the Progressive education movement initiated the ball-and-stick printing method. The progressives believed that if children wrote letters similar to those in a book, they would learn to read more quickly. Also, they thought learning to print would be easier for young children and would serve as a transitional step to learning cursive in the third or fourth grade.
Hazards of Printing First
Unfortunately, this theory is wrong. Teaching printing and then artificially switching to cursive is a flawed teaching philosophy. As Gladstone, who offers handwriting repair instruction, said,
“We do not allow this artificial split to be created in any other area of education. It would be considered ridiculous to teach math entirely in Roman numerals up into third grade, then drop it all for modern Arabic numerals….and we don’t teach English by starting off with Chinese.”
Switching writing methods resets the flow of learning. Instead of using a writing method that students have already mastered, some teachers make them start over by learning cursive while at the same time learning new content material.
Writing should already be second nature by third or fourth grade so students can focus on the content of history and science lessons. Instead, neither cursive nor the content material is learned well due to the split focus. Many students, therefore, continue to print to complete their work.
Cursive First
Instead of teaching one method and later switching to another, young students should learn to write cursive first. Cursive’s fluid motion makes it more natural for beginner writers. It is faster, has fewer stops, and is less fatiguing than printing.
Because cursive has only three main strokes, it is actually less difficult for a five-year-old to learn. Unlike printing, all letters start at the baseline and move consistently in a left to right motion. This motion prevents letter reversals and thus can reduce dyslexia.
On the other hand, printing has at least six strokes plus circles, and many letters have different starting points that a child must learn. This makes learning to print more complicated. A person must also lift the pencil off the paper between strokes, which disrupts the train of thought. Whereas the connecting letters of cursive allow the brain to maintain a thought without interruption.
Because the letters are connected, the spacing of the letters within a word written in cursive is more even than the printed word. The spacing between words often will be more uniform as well.
Cursive is the tried and true form of penmanship as author Samuel Blumenfeld points out:
“The cursive alphabet is not an arbitrary set of forms devised to make life difficult for first graders. It is the ultimate refined product of hundreds of years of trial and error in which the need for legibility and speed required such compromises and refinements as to maximize both. It was devised to make life easier, not more difficult, to provide man with one of his most useful tools of self-expression and communication.” (from p. 144, cited in Spell to Write and Read p. 35-36)
Improves Cognitive Skills
Cursive benefits children’s brain development. Research shows that learning cursive first improves reading and spelling skills. Pediatric occupational therapist Danielle Shulman lists these cognitive factors that improve when a child is taught cursive:
- sensory-motor coordination
- hand-eye coordination
- fine-motor skills development
- dynamic brain hemisphere engagement
- thinking memory
Reading Signs and Historical Documents
Children who learn to write cursive can read it. Those who only know how to print cannot read cursive. Not being able to read cursive doesn’t just make it difficult to read a birthday card note. Reading cursive is a necessary life skill. For instance, many signs use cursive.
In 2019, the town of Edmonds, near Seattle, updated its welcome sign. The local newspaper announced this change with the headline “Welcome to Edmonds—if you can read cursive.” Even journalists recognize that younger people have lost this ability.
More importantly, children need this skill to read historical documents. Old family letters and journals as well as all of our founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, were written in cursive. Historic knowledge could be lost if this ability goes the way of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
A Necessary Life Skill
Although I taught my children cursive, they prefer printing. But they had to develop a cursive signature for banking and signing other documents.
Cursive usually helps a person to write faster, which is handy for taking notes at a college lecture or a work meeting. A Spell to Write and Read trainer told me that college students must be able to handwrite essay tests because they could cheat if they used a computer. Some students struggle to finish on time because their printing slows them down.
But what about filling out “print only” forms? Children can easily transition from cursive to printing, but not the other way around, according to Shulman.
Printing has its place, but to have a complete education, students need cursive. Engaging the brain in multiple areas, cursive helps children become better students, and it is easier to learn.
Lorinda K. F. Newton began homeschooling her children in 2004, and her family joined Academy Northwest in 2014. Her family lives on beautiful Whidbey Island north of Seattle, Washington. She writes about faith, culture, and governing from a biblical worldview at Lorinda’s Ponderings and Lorinda’s Ponderings on Facebook.
