Parents, teachers, and researchers wonder whether cursive writing should be part of elementary schools’ curricula.

Specifically, questions are raised regarding the role of this form of handwriting in the 21st century and whether the benefits of learning it offset the time and resources required.

Writing across America

The number of states that require cursive writing instruction has increased from 14 in 2016 to more than 20 this year.

On Jan. 1, California began requiring public school teachers to offer some instruction in cursive or joined italics to students in first through sixth grades under a law the state’s governor signed in fall 2023.

As The Sacramento Bee reported, California Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Fullerton, who used to be a public elementary school teacher, said the bill’s main goal was to help students know how to read and write cursive. Many documents of the past few decades are in cursive. Teachers who want to limit students’ ability to use artificial intelligence for assignments will likely resume requiring students to handwrite responses for essay tests, and cursive would allow students to write more quickly.

That state is among many that require cursive, unlike the 2010 national Common Core State Standards. The federal standards included keyboarding proficiency instead. For example, students in fourth grade, according to those standards, should be able to type at least one page in one sitting.

States that require cursive writing education include Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. Pennsylvania Rep. Joseph Adams, R-Hawley, introduced legislation this session to require elementary schools to teach cursive handwriting.

“While digital devices are pervasive, many important documents require signatures or other handwriting. Students also need cursive to read historical documents,” Adams said in an announcement Dec. 12, 2023. “A growing cursive illiteracy poses a threat to accessing and comprehending key historical sources, such as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Mandating cursive writing education will allow students to actively read seminal documents that shaped our democracy which is vital for an informed, engaged citizenry in the generations to come.”

Indiana passed a bill in 2023 that required elementary schools to report to the Department of Education whether they teach cursive and at which grade level. The report that the department published in December found that 809 of the 1,386 elementary schools that responded to the survey teach cursive writing. Most instruction is in grade three.

Are printed books and typing threatening?

In her 2000 book “Cursive Writing Made Easy & Fun,” Kama Einhorn wrote that while learning cursive is demanding for students because it requires additional alphabet recognition and fine motor skills, teachers continued having students learn it for several reasons. Some, like how fourth-grade teachers only used cursive and required students to be able to write it and how students’ ease in recognizing cursive would allow them to focus on matters that required more advanced thinking, were contextual. Others were more mechanical, like being able to use more computer fonts and increasing the flow involved in writing words, as the letters are connected. Students may have less difficulty with “letter reversal,” as the cursive letter “b” is more distinct from the letter “d” when they are written in cursive instead of print.

“Cursive can be thought of as the glue that holds words together, allowing for a whole-word approach rather than the examination of single letters,” Einhorn wrote.

Furthermore, she said, cursive allows individuals to develop their own style; teaching cursive provides students another tool for personal expression. Students may also take pride in learning the writing system.

Harvard professor and former president Drew Gilpin Faust wrote in a 2022 article in The Atlantic that about 10 of the 15 students in the undergraduate seminar she was teaching couldn’t read cursive, and a larger portion of the class couldn’t write cursive. Most of her students said they couldn’t read manuscripts or professors’ handwritten comments. They steered toward research topics that allowed them to only use sources.

Concerns about handwriting date back centuries.

Anne Trubek described handwriting’s history and speculated about its future in her 2016 book “The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting” and an online article.

In its early days, around the end of the 19th century, the typewriter was greeted with enthusiasm from many educators, Trubek wrote in her book. The typewriter forced people to improve their punctuation and spelling since errors became much easier to spot when typed. Students had been able to hide errors with messy handwriting. Typing was also faster than handwriting, both for the writer and the reader. While early typewriters were expensive, heavy and slower than the 30 words per minute record for handwriting, which was 30 words per minute in 1853, the machine improved.

When typing became common, some people complained about a loss in education in penmanship, she said. However, typing prompted handwriting to become a way of expressing individuality, when it hadn’t been in previous centuries. Scribal monks in scriptoriums of the Middle Ages were supposed to avoid showing their personality, though some managed to break the rules and leave comments, like prayers that people who stole the book they were working on for months would die, or complaints about how tedious the work was. When various regions of Europe developed their own styles of writing, Charlemagne fought back for the sake of clarity by ordering everyone to use Carolingian miniscule, which reconnected uncial and Roman writing. Modern paleography scholars specialize in which scripts they learn to read, both in terms of time period and type of script.

The Zaner-Bloser Method replaced the Palmer Method, which had been popular until the 1920s, a Tiffin-Seneca Public Library article said. The D’Nealian Method was introduced in the late 1970s.

“Even someone whose life’s work is dedicated to reading cursive cannot read most cursive,” Trubek said.

According to Trubek, scribal monks like Johannes Trithemius, who lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, felt threatened by the printing press, like people now worry about the loss of handwriting. Printed texts would suffer in spelling and appearance. Conversely, in the late 18th century, more educated men were “supposed to” have worse handwriting, as those who had good handwriting could be seen as imposters. Edgar Allen Poe was among those in the early 19th century who criticized others’ handwriting, as he felt that those who wrote without much change from the method they had been taught were less original.

Trubek said that school teachers might teach handwriting as an art, building fine motor skills.

“Handwriting has always been both a way to express thoughts and an art, and preserving the artistic aspects, be it through calligraphy or mastering comic book lettering, is worthy,” she said in the article.

Duke University civil engineering professor Henry Petroski wrote in an American Society for Engineering Education article published in summer 2023 that the question of whether elementary school teachers should teach cursive handwriting isn’t the right question. The focus should be on teaching students critical thinking skills.

Engineers of his generation learned how to handwrite block capital print letters with excellent clarity and appropriate size, relative to the mechanically drafted images they would annotate. The readability of these letters contrasts with the graphic designs of holiday greeting cards his loved ones sent him.

“Instead of worrying whether our students are learning cursive or block-letter handwriting, perhaps educators should be teaching communication skills that focus on clarity of letters and graphics,” he wrote. “Although human fingers remain the primary agent by which a computer or smartphone keyboard is activated, the mind chooses the font style and size—not to mention the type and background colors. Without instruction in good form and practice, the student may never grasp that the medium and message should be, if not one and the same, then at least compatible.”

Handwriting’s fine motor skills are essential, several researchers say

A 2020 Norwegian study that involved 12 seventh-graders and 12 young adults and high-density electroencephalogram, or HD EEG, indicated typewriting, cursive handwriting and drawing are different processes. The oscillatory neuronal activity of cursive handwriting and drawing were more closely aligned compared with typewriting. Children from an early age should engage in the fine motor skills that handwriting and drawing activities build.

“An optimal learning environment needs to include the best from all disciplines, considering the strengths and support each of them offer,” the study authors said. “This way, both cognitive development and learning efficiency can be strengthened, and pupils and students of all ages and their teachers can keep up with the technological development and digital challenges to come.”

Professor Audrey van der Meer, one of the researchers, said in a 2021 Tech and Learning article about the study that she wants teachers to keep teaching students to make intricate hand movements through handwriting, whether it’s cursive writing or printing block letters. Children’s letter recognition grows. Visual notetaking by hand requires students to process the information a teacher shares before writing it, which bolsters students’ conceptual knowledge.

“Young children nowadays spend so much time behind a screen that they hardly know how to hold a pencil when they start school,” van der Meer said in the article.

Cursive may benefit children with developmental dyslexia, according to a 2019 study of 24 Italian children with dyslexia and handwriting challenges whose handwriting was compared with that of a group of 28 children with the same age and that of a group of 25 children with similar handwriting skills. For a sentence copying task, children with dyslexia were quicker in cursive than in manuscript. The study showed children with dyslexia’s handwriting in manuscript is not significantly more legible than their writing in cursive. Instead, children with dyslexia may more easily learn spelling when they’re introduced to cursive early on in these lessons.

Practical advice

Teachers and parents teaching children cursive may want to consider the following resources:

• Handwriting in a Modern World: Why It Matters & What To Do About It” William Van Cleave provides several recommendations on letter formation, pencil grip and paper positioning
• Van der Meer said coloring, laying puzzles, beading, drawing, and writing by hand can all help develop fine motor skills and head-eye and eye-hand coordination.