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C- This article was originally written in January of 2016, but wasn't published until 2022  on rccs.org by William R. Klemm.
R- This article supports the claim that cursive writing helps the mind in more ways than one.
A- Most of the evidence he used to support his claim was sighted from well rounded resources.
A- Klemm is a very authorized source to write this article, for he is a doctor of veterinary medicine, and he has a Ph.D. in psychology.
P- William had a very strong belief that cursive should be in all school systems curriculum.

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January 05, 2016By William R. Klemm, D.V.M, Ph.D.

Ever try to read your physician's prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don't know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren can't read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can't (or won't) write his own name on the new money being printed.

When we adults went to school, one of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an "ancient skill."[1]

The primary schools that teach handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation's largest handwriting-curriculum publishers, and cursive is not generally taught after the third grade (my penmanship class was in the 7th grade; maybe it's just coincidence, but the 7th grade was when I was magically transformed from a poor student into an exceptional student).

Yet scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn "functional specialization,"[2] that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.

There is spillover benefit for thinking skills used in reading and writing. To write legible cursive, fine motor control is needed over the fingers. Students have to pay attention and think about what and how they are doing it. They have to practice. Brain imaging studies show that cursive activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding.

Much of the benefit of hand writing in general comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of drawing letters. During one study at Indiana University to be published this year,[3] researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters. The brain's "reading circuit" of linked regions that are activated during reading was activated during hand writing, but not during typing. This lab has also demonstrated that writing letters in meaningful context, as opposed to just writing them as drawing objects, produced much more robust activation of many areas in both hemispheres.

In learning to write by hand, even if it is just printing, a child's brain must:

Locate each stroke relative to other strokes.

Learn and remember appropriate size, slant of global form, and feature detail characteristic of each letter.

Develop categorization skills.

Cursive writing, compared to printing, is even more beneficial because the movement tasks are more demanding, the letters are less stereotypical, and the visual recognition requirements create a broader repertoire of letter representation. Cursive is also faster and more likely to engage students by providing a better sense of personal style and ownership.

Other research highlights the hand's unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington, reported her study of children in grades two, four and six that revealed they wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.[4]

There is a whole field of research known as "haptics," which includes the interactions of touch, hand movements, and brain function.[5] Cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate visual, and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity. School systems, driven by ill-informed ideologues and federal mandate, are becoming obsessed with testing knowledge at the expense of training kids to develop better capacity for acquiring knowledge.

The benefits to brain development are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper. Not everybody can afford a computer for their kids−maybe such kids are not as deprived as we would think.

[1] Slape, L. "Cursive Giving Way to Other Pursuits as Educators Debate Its Value." The Daily News, Feb. 4, 2012. http://tdn.com/news/local/cursive-giving-way-to-other-pursuits-as...

[2] James, Karin H. an Atwood, Thea P. (2009).The role of sensorimotor learning in the perception of letter-like forms: Tracking the causes of neural specialization for letters. Cognitive Neuropsychology.26 (1), 91-100.

[3] James, K.H. and Engelhardt, L. (2013). The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children. Trends in Neuroscience and Education. Article in press.

[4] Berninger, V. "Evidence-Based, Developmentally Appropriate Writing Skills K-5: Teaching the Orthographic Loop of Working Memory to Write Letters So Developing Writers Can Spell Words and Express Ideas." Presented at Handwriting in the 21st Century?: An Educational Summit, Washington, D.C., January 23, 2012.

[5] Mangen, A., and Velay, J. -L. (2010). Digitizing literacy: reflections on the haptics of writing. In Advances in Haptics, edited by M. H. Zadeh. http://www.intechopen.com/books/advances-in-haptics/digitizing-li...

March 14, 2013

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What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain - Redeemer Classical Christian School

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January 05, 2016By William R. Klemm, D.V.M, Ph.D. Ever try to read your physician's prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don't know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren can't read the...

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C- This pro article was posted on march 10, 2017 by Tom berger in edutopia.com with the purpose of educating the youth in the importance of cursive hand writing.
R- All of the information in said article does make me further believe that cursive should be taught in schools as it used to be for the better of our youth.
A- Berger many times cites safe resources to dig deeper into this subject with and always cites evidence straight from these articles to further prove his point in his argument.
A- It is not one hundred percent clear what Tom's qualifications are that he should be writing this article but proved to be dependable because of where an d how it was published.
P- It is very clear that Tom will always agree that cursive is a very important skill to learn no matter when you learn it.

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Should cursive writing still be taught in our schools? The old debate is back with a vengeance as schools shift resources from the intricate, painstakingly rendered script to keyboard skills.

The Common Core State Standards, adopted by 42 states and the District of Columbia, call for handwriting instruction in kindergarten and first grade only, and teaching in keyboard skills after that. The standards don't mention cursive. But 14 states require cursive instruction, and the skill inspires fierce loyalty, with some going so far as to argue that the founding fathers would disapprove of our abandonment of the script-students must learn cursive in order to decipher the intent of the original Constitution, for example-and others suggesting that our very identities are compromised when we can't create identifiable signatures.

That bill was signed into law by Gov. Robert Bentley, undoubtedly in a flourish of cursive, and went into effect in May 2016. But it was just one salvo in an old battle that is picking up a new head of steam. In the fall, for example, New York City's public schools-"the country's largest school district, with 1.1 million students-encouraged teaching cursive to elementary school students." And media outlets from The Economist and PBS NewsHour to The Huffington Post continue to write about the revival of cursive, as parents, teachers, and researchers have publicly-and volubly-questioned the wisdom of killing it off.

Cursive was historically associated with good character and virtue-it was widely taught in the 19th century as " a Christian ideal... occasionally credited with disciplining the mind." But that was the high point, and the use of cursive declined throughout the 20th century as people shifted to typewriters -the first mass-market typewriter was the Signet, produced in the 1930s by Royal-and then to rudimentary computers and now, of course, to powerful smartphones.

Instruction in cursive has been declining since the 1970s, and many teacher education programs don't address handwriting instruction, thereby isolating the skill from its most natural advocates. But removing cursive from school curricula is part of an ongoing evolution, according to Anne Trubek, author of the 2016 book The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting. New modes of communication and sense making have come and gone, she says, and "proclaiming the virtuousness of one way of forming a 'j' over others is a trope that occurs throughout handwriting's history."

Is it all just nostalgia, then? Are parents and teachers who are caught up in the controversy merely reliving old glories and trying to resurrect a useless relic? Is the battle over the future of cursive, in other words, really all about the past?

Proponents of the script clearly don't think so. In the case of cursive-and more broadly, handwriting in general-there's plenty of evidence of cognitive and academic benefits. Brain scans reveal neural circuitry lighting up when young children first print letters and then read them. The same effect is not apparent when the letters are typed or traced. Intriguingly, according to reporting in The New York Times, "block printing, cursive, and typing each elicit distinctive neurological patterns," implying a deep, underlying sensitivity in the brain to even minor changes in the way letters are rendered on the page. When reading and writing, we appear to be hardwired for versatility.

I think your cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do.

Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at the University of Washington, confirms that point, arguing that it's not a case of either/or-there are good reasons to teach handwriting, cursive, and keyboard skills. " In one recent study, she and her coauthors reported that cursive in particular had measurable positive effects on older children's spelling and composition skills"-because cursive is faster than print (though the speed argument is itself a disputed point). And there is some evidence that cursive helps students with dyslexia learn to read and write because it "integrates hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, and other brain and memory functions." Other studies broaden the benefits to handwriting generally while suggesting limitations to computer-based literacy, concluding that "teaching handwriting improves students' composition, reading comprehension, brain function, and motor skills," and that students who take notes by hand instead of on a laptop process the information better.

If these findings are accurate, they form a powerful argument for continuing to teach handwriting, though not necessarily cursive. But digital technology has clearly emerged as a powerful democratizing force, knocking down barriers to access for students with special needs. If some studies show that cursive helps dyslexic students learn to read, for example, others-like a study from the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity-conclude that students with dyslexia will be " big winners" from a switch to keyboarding because that skill helps them improve on the volume of words used, written clarity, spelling, and editing. And there's another benefit, according to Steve Graham, an education professor who has studied writing instruction for three decades: When "teachers rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in terms of legibility, they assign higher grades to neatly written versions of the paper." Keyboards render that deeply unfair bias moot.

The continued pace of technological change doesn't bode well for the future of handwriting-the assault on all forms of manual writing is likely to continue. Artificial intelligence and language recognition are rapidly growing fields, putting powerful, marvelously simple communication tools in the hands of millions of consumers. But given all of the compelling research on handwriting, and the deep cultural and historical meaning of the practice, we should ask whether the Common Core has abandoned the teaching of handwriting and cursive too hastily. As Anne Trubek notes in her book, "We will lose something as we print and write in cursive less and less, but loss is inevitable." So the question remains: What precisely are we losing-and what is it worth?

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What We Lose With the Decline of Cursive

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Technology is gradually replacing cursive instruction-but have we taken stock of what we're losing?

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C- This article was posted on in 2018 by the New York Times.
R- This article highlights why learning cursive should be such an essential learning curve in school as an adolescent.
A- The author of this article is Jeremy Engle who worked for over 20 years in classroom humanities and was a documentary-making teacher.
A- This information supports our claim because it describes an actual situation where an adolescent succeeded very heavily in school after learning cursive.
P- The purpose of this article was to inform readers how academically impactful learning cursive could be.

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Should All Schools Teach Cursive? (Published 2019)

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A 10-year-old cursive champ makes an argument in its favor. Is he convincing?

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C- This passage was posted on October 10, 2016 by Liana Loewus.
R- The information in this text shows more ways why learning cursive could be more impractical than impactful in our schools curriculum.
A- Loewus is the author of this article and she is the assistant managing editor who revised the article to be more professional.
A- It shows multiple different stances on the topic to go against the claim that we should learn cursive in school.
P- The purpose of this information was to show an alternate opinion on the matter of learning cursive.

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Should schools teach cursive handwriting? The question is an impressively polarizing one in the K-12 education world.

One of the most widely cited criticisms of the Common Core State Standards is that they don't require teaching students to write in cursive.

Some states, such as Tennessee and California, have added cursive to the standards. Louisiana appears to have gone the farthest, mandating that students get instruction in cursive every year from the 3rd through 12th grades.

Proponents of teaching cursive say students need to learn it to be able to read historical documents, such as the U.S. Constitution. Without knowing cursive, students "will be locked out of doing research with literary papers and archival collections," Valerie Hotchkiss, a library director at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014. "They will not even be able to read their grandmother's diary or their parents' love letters."

Others say cursive helps students write faster than print, and that they need it to develop a signature.

Technology Took Priority

So why didn't the common-core writers include cursive? In a recent interview, Sue Pimentel, one of the lead writers of the English/language arts standards, explained that the decision was about priorities-and that learning to use technology took precedence.

"We thought that more and more of student communications and adult communications are via technology. And knowing how to use technology to communicate and to write was most critical for students," she said. "The idea is you have to pick things to put in there. .... It really was a discussion."

Anchor standard No. 6 for writing illustrates the tech focus, asking students to "use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others."

The decision to exclude cursive was also based on feedback from teachers, according to Pimentel.

"One of the things we heard from teachers around the country-in some cases, obviously not all-was that sometimes cursive writing takes an enormous amount of instructional time," she said. "You could be spending time on other things rather than students practicing cursive writing. It's really a matter of emphasis."

Pimentel points out that the K-5 language standards do require students to "print all upper- and lowercase letters," so it's not as if handwriting is left out of the document entirely. She also notes that states had the ability to add standards, and that adding cursive is "very legitimate."

"For states that added it, I have no qualms," she said.

Being able to read in cursive is important, Pimentel says. But the writers didn't think it was a place teachers should spend a lot of time and energy.

"One of the things we were thinking is that if we put cursive writing in, there would be all this practice of forming your letters," she said. "But if we didn't have it in there, it wasn't that teachers wouldn't teach it, it's that it wouldn't have [as much] emphasis."

Looking at the Research

But what does the research say about cursive? Does it back the decision not to specifically require it in the standards?

In discussing this issue, people often conflate handwriting overall-which could be in any script-with cursive.

According to Steve Graham, a professor of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University, who has studied writing instruction for more than 30 years, research has shown benefits for teaching and practicing handwriting generally.

Being able to handwrite quickly makes it easier for people to get their ideas on paper. Students who struggle with handwriting "may have to devote other cognitive resources to this low-level task, which takes away from other higher-level aspects of writing like thinking about how you're going to organize a text," he said.

Having good handwriting also helps students in school, where teacher surveys have shown the majority of writing is still done on paper. "A reasonable amount of research suggests if your handwriting is not very legible, people will form opinions about the quality of what you say," said Graham. "The more legible paper will get higher scores for writing than the less legible paper of the same quality."

There's also some research that suggests people remember things better when taking notes by hand, rather than with a word processor.

Little Difference Between Print and Cursive

So what about cursive specifically? Are there reasons to write in cursive rather than print?

Not really, says Graham.

While many people say that cursive writing is faster than printing because the writer doesn't have to lift his or her pencil from the paper, the research bears that out to be only minimally true.

"Today's cursive scripts are not these flourishing things of yesteryear," he said. "They're really simple. ... If you look at the data [on speed for print and cursive], it doesn't look that different."

People also say that print is easier to read than cursive, but again Graham says the research isn't definitive on this either.

"There's not a lot of difference between how legible the two scripts are and how fast they can be produced," he said.

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, confirmed that print-versus-cursive finding in a 2013 article for the National Association of State Boards of Education. "No clear research evidence supports one being better than the other," she wrote.

However, Berninger has also shown that printing, cursive, and keyboarding activate different brain patterns, and that in some cases, students with certain disabilities may struggle with print but do well with cursive.

According to a 2014 New York Times article, some researchers say cursive "may even be a path to treating dyslexia."

Teach One or Both?

The question still remains as to what's best practice for general classrooms.

As Graham sees it, given the many time constraints teachers have, there's really no reason to teach more than one handwriting style.

"Schools are being asked to teach typing. Should they also be asked to teach manuscript and cursive?... We want students to be fluent and legible in at least one of these-which one doesn't make that much difference."

Having students learn both, he said, "seems to be inefficient and a waste of time. ... Which one of those you teach, that ought to be up to the schools and teachers." While U.S. students traditionally begin learning to write with print letters (as the common core requires), they very well could start with cursive-as young students do in many European countries.

Berninger, on the other hand, said there's a good case for teaching both print and cursive.

"Teaching BOTH of these handwriting formats has advantages, including learning to recognize and write letters despite small variations in letter forms sharing the same name," she wrote in the NASBE commentary. "Consider all the fonts computer users can choose from for word processing. Apple's Steve Jobs was an accomplished calligrapher before he became a pioneer in technology tools to support writing-and that is one of the reasons we have so many font styles to choose from in computer writing!"
Image: Students practice both printing and cursive handwriting skills at the Mountaineer Montessori School in Charleston, W.Va. -Bob Bird/AP-File Education Week library interns Laura Zollers and Teresa Lewandowski contributed to this post. Related stories: For more news and information on reading, math, and STEM instruction: And sign up here to get alerts in your email inbox when stories are published on Curriculum Matters.

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Why Don't the Common-Core Standards Include Cursive Writing?

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Should schools teach cursive handwriting? The question is an impressively polarizing one in the K-12 education world. One of the most widely cited criticisms of the Common Core State Standards is that they don't require teaching students to write in cursive. Some states, such as Tennessee and California, have added cursive to the standards.

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C- This article against my claim was published in 2017 to the New York Times.
R- The information in this article highlights any flaws that comes with having to learn cursive.
A- There is multiple points in this New York Times piece where the writer talked about how cursive writing is almost irrelevant from our everyday lives.
A- The author of this article is Morgan Polikoff who is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education.
P- Polikoff wrote this article to show how impractical learning cursive is.

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Morgan Polikoff is an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education, where he researches the design and effects of standards, assessment and accountability policies.

Districts and states should not mandate the teaching of cursive. Cursive should be allowed to die. In fact, it's already dying, despite having been taught for decades. Very small proportions of adults use cursive for their day-to-day writing. Much of our communication is done on a keyboard, and the rest is done with print.

Educators and policymakers should resist the urge to add more skills to the Common Core because doing so undermines the strength of the standards.

Additionally, there is little compelling research to suggest the teaching of cursive positively affects other student skills enough to merit its teaching. While both research and common sense indicate students should be taught some form of penmanship, there is simply no need to teach students both print and cursive.

The Common Core standards are well constructed and full of the essential skills students need to succeed in reading and writing. The architects of the standards certainly weighed the inclusion of cursive and believed there was no need to include it. Thus, educators and policymakers should resist the urge to add more skills. Doing so would simply result in a crowded, less-focused curriculum, undermining the strength of the standards.

Given these realities, teachers would be better off focusing on the skills and knowledge that will impact student success in the future. These include printing and typing, but not cursive. As we have done with the abacus and the slide rule, it is time to retire the teaching of cursive. The writing is on the wall.

Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.

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Morgan Polikoff is an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education, where he researches the design and effects of standards, assessment and accountability policies. Districts and states should not mandate the teaching of cursive. Cursive should be allowed to die.

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It does not say specifically anywhere on the cite what day this image was posted or created, but it was created by Eric Cartman to be published in, "The Coon". This image helps support my claim because if character had learned how to write i cursive at a younger age they would be able to read the handwriting of others with no exceptions.

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A character depicted with terrible handwriting. Not just a couple of words that can't be made out here and there, but almost every word will be impossible-or almost impossible-to read. This does not apply to depictions in animation ...

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This cartoon was drawn by an unknown artist in "The County Press" on September 22, 2013. This helps support my claim because if kids at a young age were exposed to more serious topics, they would have more background knowledge in using what they remember and applying it to real life situations and decisions.

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The comic above was designed by Gary Varvel to be publish on July 16, 2011 to cartoonistgroup.com to show how even some older people may not even be able to read some of the history in our lives, and messages from our ancestors due to the lack of education.

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Gary Varvel’s Editorial Cartoons by Gary Varvel 2011-07-16; comics and cartoons, Wow, is this some ancient hieroglyphics? No, its the Declaration of Independence written in cursive.. Available for reprint.

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C- This video was posted on June 10, of 2014 by "Seeker" on Youtube.com.
R- This video also answers the question further so to the point where it's hardly a question anymore considering the reasoning behind it. If it's good for your brain it's good for you.
A- Numerous times in the video they mentioned studies and other resources where they got their information from.
A- Trace Dominguez is a reward winning scientist and is the male host in the video.
P- This video is specifically to support the idea and encourage other people to learn cursive and expand the horizon to new writing.

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C- This informational video was posted on Youtube.com on January 6, 2018.
R- This video presents how handwriting your notes, and other types of information is much better than always using technology for ones education.
A- Many times in the video he cites where he got his statistics from and they all correspond to the topic of learning cursive.
A- Trace Dominguez is a producer, a host, a writer, and a consultant of the channel "Seeker" on YouTube, and he is also a reward winning scientist.
P- Dominguez makes it very clear throughout the short educational video that the affects of our handwriting definitely benefit us more than typing.

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Typing vs. Handwriting: Which Is Better for Your Memory?

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This comical piece debuted on August 8, 2020 to the website better known as cartoonistgroup.com. This illustration demonstrates how our generation will eventually turn out if we do not learn how to read, how different generations learned how to write.

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This image was published on February 2, 2018 by Dave Coverly in a "Speed Bump" cartoon. This picture describes some kids view cursive and the way older generations talk or act. The only time they showed proper grammar or punctuation is when the mother is speaking to represent how kids speak over technology.