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Ohio has joined many other states in reestablishing cursive in their schools' curricula.

Research shows the value handwriting has for developing children's fine motor skills and a connection between words and memory.

But experts seem split on whether it's a question of print vs. cursive, or cognitive fluency vs. disconnect.

Cursive is set for a comeback.

Last month, the Ohio State Legislature added cursive to the Ohio Department of Education's English language arts standards. House Bill 58 requires the department to include supplemental materials on developing handwriting "as a universal skill," with print learned by third grade and legible cursive by fifth. With this bill, Ohio joins the more than a dozen states who have adopted such legislation after Common-Core standards dropped cursive as a requirement.

"It seemed we had made a decision that was arrogant on our part that we didn't think these kids needed something that we had taken for granted, that was our way of communicating for generations," Beth Mizell, a Louisiana state senator, told the Washington Post. In 2016, Louisiana passed an even more thorough bill than Ohio's, requiring cursive instruction continue through the 12th grade.

Cursive's purpose in an era of typing and voice recognition software has dwindled. Even the signature, cursive's seemingly unassailable bastion, has proved less sound thanks to PIN numbers and touchpads that turn any autograph into a symbolic work of abstract art.

For most of us, that thought elicits one of two responses. Either we bristle at the thought of a future generation's not knowing cursive's lovely, flowing script. Or we cheer at the idea, remembering the jeers of teachers past at our blocky, yet readable, print.

Unfortunately, such reactions are seldom derived from an understanding of the research and more often the joy or trauma we experienced when learning cursive. That goes for the legislators, too.

Of course, we can teach children cursive, but does it provide any developmentally benefit to do so?

Handwriting and its proponents

Handwriting, whether in cursive or not, has been shown to help students develop conceptual understanding better than those who use laptops to take notes in class. Image source: Flickr

To start, it's worth pointing out that some people conflate cursive and handwriting as synonymous, and that's not the case. Handwriting is as an ink-bound idiolect; everyone's is different. Some people print exclusively, others use cursive, and many have formed an amalgam of the two (a category that can broadly be called D'Nealian).

If we look at handwriting, not explicitly cursive, there's little doubt that it is important to child development. A study published in Trends in Neuroscience and Education has preliterate five-year-old children either print, type, or trace letters and shapes. They then underwent an MRI scan while being shown the image again. The researchers found that a "reading circuit" fired up only in the children who drew the letter or shape freehand-not the children who typed or traced it.

The brain activity exhibited by the handwriting children was in the same areas of the brain adults use to read and write. Study author Karin James notes that handwriting required the children to first plan and then execute the action, steps not necessary when typing or tracing. The end results were also messy and variable, which James believes may provide a learning benefit.

The advantages of handwriting appear to extend beyond initially learning to read and write. A 2014 paper in Psychological Sciencecompared students who took notes longhand to those who took them on a laptop. The laptop students performed worse on conceptual questions. The researchers theorized the difference resulted from the way longhand notes force us to process and then reframe information.

They were also careful to compare notetaking with notetaking. The laptop's ability to curb our conceptual capacity through multitasking and distraction was well-documented in other studies.

"I think this may be another case where we should be careful that the lure of the digital world doesn't take away significant experiences that can have real impacts on children's rapidly developing brains," wrote Perri Klass, M.D., for the New York Times. "Mastering handwriting, messy letters and all, is a way of making written language your own, in some profound ways."

None of this is to say that typing is detrimental. Handwriting proponents simply argue that students shouldn't skip over handwriting and go directly to typing.

For her article, Klass spoke with Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology, University of Washington. Berninger recommends children become "hybrid writers," learning first print for reading, then cursive for spelling, and then typing for speed. Berninger also points out that typing may strengthen cross-communication in the brain since children use both hands.

Arguments against cursive

Some argue that if students don't learn cursive they won't be able to read historical documents like the Declaration of Independence. But does learning cursive really make that easier? Image source: Flickr

Cursive is considered to grant three advantages to students: speed, comprehension, and fine motor skills. As the theory goes, when writers lift the pen from the page less frequently, they can write more words per minute, getting their thoughts on the page faster. The comprehension argument supposes students who cannot write cursive cannot read it, hindering them from understanding historical documents.

"But the real reason cursive is fading is that the arguments in favor of it are pretty weak," writes Vox news editor Libby Nelson. "They usually center on students being able to read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence (which were originally written in copperplate script, and are hard to decipher even for people who studied cursive in school) or on developing fine motor skills, which can also be cultivated in other ways."

As for speed, typing is significantly faster once mastered.

Anne Trubek, author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, argues that early education should supplant cursive with "cognitive automaticity" - that is, "the ability to make letters without conscious effort." She suggests that keyboards are excellent tools for such learning and grant additional benefits to students with poor handwriting and those with fine-motor disabilities. To back up her claims, she points to studies showing students are writing longer, more rhetorically complex essays than past generations, despite fewer writing in cursive.

"People talk about the decline of handwriting as if it's proof of the decline of civilization," writes Trubek, in a New York Times op-ed. "But if the goal of public education is to prepare students to become successful, employable adults, typing is inarguably more useful than handwriting. [And] there seems to be no difference in benefits between printing and cursive."

The cursive quandary

Is cursive writing obsolete? Perhaps a better question is whether cursive is important to helping children communicate ideas clearly. Image source: PxHere

But does cursive offer more cognitive boons than print, or is it simply more pleasing to the eye? Here experts have struggled to make a definitive case, but there is some evidence to suggest that cursive may bestow developmental gains.

One study showed that cursive predicted better spelling and composing in fourth to seventh graders. Another made the case that it benefited children with developmental dysgraphia.

A study published in Language and Literacy found that cursive demonstrated improved students' spelling, text construction, and graphic-motor skills. Interestingly, study author Professor Isabelle Montésinos-Gelet noted that children were better off learning either print or cursive, as the print-cursive method demonstrated the worst results for students by limiting the acquisition of automatic motor skills.

It's worth pointing out that these findings aren't robust (yet). They can be contradictory, too. Dr. Berninger's "hybrid writers" idea seems in opposition to Montésinos-Gelet's argument against a joint approach. One of the reasons for this, as noted by Karin Harman James, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, is that it is difficult to find children whose educational backgrounds only differ in handwriting style.

"There is no conclusive evidence that there is a benefit for learning cursive for a child's cognitive development," she told .

What are we to do then when it comes to schools' curricula? Scott Beers, an associate professor and chair of the master of education in literacy program at Seattle Pacific University, has a suggestion.

"I want to reframe the question," Beers writes. "Instead of asking which form of writing to teach, we should ask what we most want for our students as they learn to write. What's the end goal?"

For Beers, that end goal should be to help students express their ideas clearly. How they transcribe those ideas is less important than the ideas themselves. He argues that students need to learn to write by hand and develop handwriting fluency-whether that fluency come from print, cursive, or an idiosyncratic D'Nealian script.

"I don't think one form is 'better' than the other - research is thin and far from conclusive - but mastering two forms requires twice the time and effort, and is particularly challenging for those with writing difficulties," he adds.

In this light, Ohio and Louisiana's legislation is far too sweeping. It may be worth introducing students to cursive, and students who find it appealing can certainly master it, but requiring legible cursive by fifth grade-let alone mandating it until twelfth-says more about the legislative's desire to polish the patina off a cultural artifact than an understanding of child development.

Related Articles Around the Web

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Is cursive writing important to child development?

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Ohio State added cursive to its education standards last month, but even experts are split on whether cursive is important to child development or not. While cursive may be seen as less important, handwriting has many proven benefits for child development and student comprehension later in life.

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Nearly two dozen states have reintroduced cursive instruction since 2010, when the Common Core standards dropped a requirement that it be taught in elementary schools. Credit... Peter Stevenson for The New York Times

While cursive has been relegated to nearly extinct tasks like writing thank-you cards and signing checks, rumors of its death may be exaggerated.

The Common Core standards seemed to spell the end of the writing style in 2010 when they dropped requirements that the skill be taught in public elementary schools, but about two dozen states have reintroduced the practice since then.

Last year, elementary schools in Illinois were required to offer at least one class on cursive.

Last month, a law went into effect in Ohio providing funding for materials to help students learn cursive by fifth grade.

And beginning this fall, second graders in Texas will learn cursive, and will be required to know how to write it legibly by third grade.

Even as keyboards and screens have supplanted pencil and paper in schools, lawmakers and defenders of cursive have lobbied to re-establish this old-school writing pedagogy across the country, igniting a debate about American values and identity and exposing intergenerational fault lines.

When Anne Trubek, the author of " The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting," started studying the resurgence of cursive about a decade ago, reasons for teaching it focused on developing a civilized, well-mannered population.

"People were upset about the idea that you might not seem educated if you didn't know cursive," she said.

But in recent years, the reasoning for cursive became associated with "convention, tradition, conservatism," she said, and tied to discussions about school uniforms and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Indeed, several Republican lawmakers have spearheaded campaigns to revive the writing style.

In 2016, lawmakers in Washington introduced a bill backing cursive after Pam Roach, then a Republican state senator, noted that a constituent had said her grandchild could not read a handwritten letter. The measure did not pass.

"Part of being an American is being able to read cursive writing," Ms. Roach told King 5 News.

Lawmakers have also invoked the Declaration of Independence, which was marked by John Hancock's flamboyant signature, as a reason for a script revival.

Andrew Brenner told the local news media in Ohio in December, when he was a state representative, that he had co-sponsored a bill requiring cursive instruction because studies show benefits for brain development and hand dexterity. He said it also taught students to read prominent historical texts.

"You can learn the founding documents from reading them directly," Mr. Brenner, a Republican who now serves in the Ohio Senate, told The Fulton County Expositor.

Others have emphasized the importance of a signature.

"I think your cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do," Dickie Drake, a Republican state representative in Alabama who introduced a bill requiring schools to provide cursive instruction by the end of third grade, told The New York Times in 2016.

Lawmakers in Louisiana supported an even broader measure, in part, because Magna Carta and the United States Constitution were written in cursive. State senators shouted "America!" when they unanimously approved it in 2016.

The history of society is intertwined with the history of script.

"When we want to embrace the past, when we get nostalgic for the past, when we think it was better, then we get all warm and fuzzy about handwriting," Tamara Plakins Thornton, the author of "Handwriting in America," said in an interview with NPR.

Cursive was also politicized during the Cold War, becoming a display of patriotism.

"Unbelievably, there were arguments that the fact that American kids couldn't do cursive made us vulnerable to the Russian menace," Dr. Thornton said.

Psychologists and neuroscientists say that handwriting positively affects brain development, motor skills, comprehension and memory. Cursive may be particularly helpful for those with developmental dysgraphia - motor-control difficulties in forming letters - and it may help prevent the reversal and inversion of letters, according to a 2012 report.

But some research has been taken out of context, or misrepresented, to further a pro-cursive agenda, said Kate Gladstone, who calls herself the Handwriting Repairwoman and runs an organization by the same name.

"The world of handwriting is very much the world of fake news and crooked elections," she said.

In 2018, State Senator Jean Leising of Indiana was called out for citing a study that she claimed showed cursive writing "prepares students' brains for reading and enhances their writing fluency and composition." The researcher said the study made claims only about writing by hand.

There are also corporate interests at play. In 2013, Ms. Gladstone traced research that was used in bills in North and South Carolina to require cursive instruction in schools to a for-profit company that creates instructional materials to teach handwriting, Zaner-Bloser Publishing.

Kathleen Wright, a spokeswoman for the company's handwriting division, said that it does not lobby for legislation, but that it does provide lawmakers with research "because we're recognized as the gold standard of handwriting instruction," she said.

But Ms. Wright acknowledged that some legislators "may have erroneously conflated studies showing the cognitive benefits of writing by hand to focus specifically on the benefits of writing in cursive."

Sheila Lowe, the president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation, said that about 21 states had adopted some form of cursive requirement in schools since the Common Core standards were introduced.

"We're not trying to replace electronics," Ms. Lowe said. "Cursive is an important part of brain training."

The foundation formed Campaign for Cursive, which works with legislators to craft measures supporting the practice and offers training courses for cursive coaches as well as an annual "Cursive Is Cool" competition.

Gayna Scott, a leader of the campaign, said cursive was a surprisingly charged topic, both emotionally and politically.

"You can get people worked up about it," she said.

But the organization has been able to "change over quite a few states" by providing research to decision makers about the benefits, she added.

"There are a lot of people who think we're as old as dinosaurs," she said, but "it's a lifelong skill that is part of a well-rounded education. Why leave it out?"

Some teachers say policymakers are out of touch with the realities of the modern classroom.

"I am here to build 21st-century learners," said Heather Sox, a fifth-grade teacher in Greenville, S.C. "We should expose them, but I think you can do it in other ways that don't involve 'skill and drill.'"

A few years ago, after a new mandate was imposed, she had to "find time during the week" to teach cursive, she said. Although the students barely touched the new workbooks, she said, she still had to give them a handwriting grade.

Noelle Mapes, a third-grade teacher at a public school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, said the agenda to include cursive classes "feels like a big nostalgia move."

"I'm a millennial teacher, so it almost feels like a boomer effort," she said.

The practice was helpful when teaching children with occupational therapy needs or fine motor skill needs. But requiring cursive is not a good use of time, she said, especially because schools and teachers face more urgent demands.

"Add typing skills, anti-racist pedagogy, add activism skills, add digital literacy," she said. "There are so many other things."

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Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It's Coming Back.

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While cursive has been relegated to nearly extinct tasks like writing thank-you cards and signing checks, rumors of its death may be exaggerated. The Common Core standards seemed to spell the end of the writing style in 2010 when they dropped requirements that the skill be taught in public elementary schools, but about two dozen states have reintroduced the practice since then.

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Remember cursive? It's that form of writing wherein letters are joined together in connective, riverine style that evolved from "printing" to make the process faster and easier - and the pen or pencil never have to leave the page.

Another way to think of cursive might be as an "endangered species."

Seemingly forever, learning to write in longhand was a routine part of a student's educational curriculum. But, starting several years ago, the Common Core State Standards education guidelines - a national initiative adopted on a state-by-state basis that determines what K-12 students should learn annually, no longer require teaching cursive - and the issue has become an occasionally heated debate nationwide.

The stripped-down argument against the discipline is that, in an age of modern and increasingly sophisticated technology, a student's fluency on keyboards and computers is far more important than time spent mastering a handwriting style. On the other hand - the hand holding a pen in it, one assumes - proponents say learning to write in cursive has many worthy benefits that are being flattened by the steamroller of progress.

In local school districts and across Connecticut - one of 41 states, the District of Columbia and four territories to adopt Common Core standards - the fate of cursive is in a sort of limbo. None of the area district superintendents responded to email requests for comments on cursive policy, but a few local educators spoke on the record.

"Whether we'll still have cursive going forward is a big question, and I have conversations about it on a yearly basis with colleagues, parents, and grandparents," says Joe Macrino, principal of Oswegatchie Elementary School in Waterford. "Part of the third-grade curriculum in Waterford is cursive instruction. It doesn't pop up again formally in curriculum documents; after that introduction, students have a choice to go further with manual writing or keyboards or speech-to-text."

Jeannine Barber, who teaches English and creative writing at East Lyme High School, says she has students from four different feeder schools coming into her classrooms and experiences a wide range in terms of how well, if at all, kids know cursive.

"A lot of my students say they just never learned," Barber says. "One way or another, I guess it shouldn't be so variable at this point, but it is. There doesn't seem to be a standard that says we value or should teach this."

Failing any specific state-wide policy, teaching cursive is at the whim of any given teacher or, as in the case of Waterford, mandated instruction on a limited basis. But, even with the acknowledged reality of our computer-based future, it seems there are still sound and competitive reasons to teach cursive.

Jean Jordan, who taught elementary school in New London for over 30 years and is now retired, says, "I really believe we need to keep teaching cursive. It helps a student develop motor skills, and there's a difference in learning when you have a pen or pencil in your hand rather than if you're typing. Some students with dyslexia or other disabilities have a hard time with print. Cursive looks very different and gives those students another way to learn and gain confidence. I was taught as a student - and it was only reinforced when I was a teacher - that handwriting puts you in a conditioned mode of thought that improves cognition."

Barber echoes this theme.

"Data suggests kids who learn cursive pay attention and commit things to memory autonomically when they're writing by hand rather than on a computer," she says. "I'm not sure how that information is gathered, but I have to believe practicing cursive improves motor skills."

There are also practical real world situations within some of the schools themselves. Barber remembers, "In the middle of administering the SATs and ACTs, when I was proctoring once, the students had to write the honor statement in cursive. It clearly said, 'DO NOT PRINT.' The whole thing shut down." She laughs. "That was maybe the hardest part of the tests."

There's also the fact that cursive isn't just another means of expression or a learning tool. Without an ability to read cursive, for example, those school field trips where students get to peer at "The Declaration of Independence" or the original handwritten manuscript pages of Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" don't resonate in particularly dramatic fashion.

"One thing I distinctly remember about teaching fifth grade is that history is written in cursive documents," Jordan says. "By knowing that and making a decision to not teach cursive, you're leaving out parts of the past."

At the same time, cursive - and its more distinguished cousin calligraphy - have aesthetic qualities.

"Cursive is an art form," Macrino says, "and any time you take away the arts, the pitchforks come out. Cursive is reflective of personality, too, and personal relationships. You sign the big things in life with a cursive signature. Children instantly see their parents using it and recognize a rite of passage in learning to write it. If you get rid of that, we're turning our backs on the past a bit.

"Plus," he adds, laughing, "when I was a Waterford teacher, I was glad I got to teach cursive because the students could see my handwriting skills, and I got to show them I wasn't great at everything."

"Maybe it's just me, but you became a 'big kid' when you started to learn cursive," Barber says. "The trend seems to be - I don't know - that it's not important. Do we not value it or what? My daughter is in kindergarten and wants to learn it. And I want her to be able to learn it."

Jordan suggests there are even different degrees of each person's cursive skills that convey different attitudes. She shares an anecdote about intentionally tweaking her own longhand in a sloppy fashion just to playfully irritate her mother.

"I have what I call my 'classroom handwriting,'" she explains, "and the students would say, 'Oh, you write so nicely.' Well, my Mom doesn't think so - and of course I'd done that on purpose."

In that spirit, there's more than a little touch of nostalgia to the idea of perpetuating the cursive tradition.

Macrino says, "We don't want to remove ourselves from human touch. Hand-signed Christmas cards from kids, friends who took the time to write a letter ... these things deepen meaning and the idea of friendship. So, when we're inundated with technology, in my district, at least, it's important to treasure human touch as a priority.

"There's a Peter Pan element to what we do," Macrino continues. "I understand that we're preparing our kids for jobs that don't even exist yet, and we can't live in the past. We're trying to prepare them socially and emotionally as well as academically, how to be good humans as well as educated humans. There's a magic to childhood, and cursive is part of that. Maybe knowing cursive won't get you a job, but it adds to your personality. I can only speak for my district, but we treasure that."

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Is the long tradition of cursive handwriting on the way out?

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Remember cursive? It's that form of writing wherein letters are joined together in connective, riverine style that evolved from "printing" to make the process faster and easier - and the pen or pencil never have to leave the page. Another way to think of cursive might be as an "endangered species."

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Advocates for learning cursive (including Idaho representative Linden Bateman, 72) argue that "more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard."

Bateman continues, "The fluid motion employed when writing script enhances hand-eye coordination and develops fine motor skills, in turn promoting reading, writing and cognition skills."

And if that's the reasons schools taught cursive, sure, fine. That's great. Also, there are plenty of other ways that kids can develop hand-eye coordination that doesn't involve spending a year of their prime development time learning a new alphabet.

But Bateman also argues that forgoing cursive may have much more consequential results: He argues we "will lose the ability to interpret valuable cultural resources-historical documents, ancestors' letters and journals, handwritten scholarship - if they can't read cursive."

"The Constitution of the United States is written in cursive. Think about that," Bateman said.

The Constitution of the United States is also available online, typed out. Not in cursive. Soooooo...We're probably good.

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Cursive Handwriting Will No Longer Be Taught in Schools Because It's a Big, Old Waste of Time - E! Online

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Advocates for learning cursive (including Idaho representative Linden Bateman, 72) argue that "more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard." Bateman continues, "The fluid motion employed when writing script enhances hand-eye coordination and develops fine motor skills, in turn promoting reading, writing and cognition skills."

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In Holly Martin's third-grade class at Saint Columbkille in Brighton, the old-fashioned chalkboard has been replaced with an electronic screen. But Martin uses the screen to teach her students a concept older than the one-room school house: how to write in cursive.

"Two humps, like a camel," she says, as she forms a lowercase "n" and then, echoing a point made by a student, added, "some camels have one hump."

A tendency toward precision helps when writing cursive. These kids practice daily, and at least once a week Martin does a deep dive in penmanship.

"Some of the kids wonder why we're learning it," she said.

Unlike the generation of kids who grew up staring at chalkboards, they're growing up in a time when most people tap out their thoughts on a keyboard.

Yet there is among students, like eight-year-old Jabez Lubega, an appreciation for it.

"I think it's more fancy," he said. "Like, if you were writing a book and you wanted to use cursive, it would look more fancy."

Cursive, said Martin, offers creativity and an opportunity for self-expression. It's a skill she said her students will use all their lives, from writing letters to reading old documents to signing their names.

The importance of a legible and consistent signature was brought into sharp relief in the aftermath of the midterm elections. Thousands of ballots were discarded in Florida because election workers were unable to match mail-in ballot signatures to the ones on file.

"I would say it's important to sign your own name," said Martin, "and even the students in my class know that they need to know how to write their own name and write it in a signature, because you're going to use that. It's part of your identity."

Teaching cursive has long been a hallmark of Catholic schools, like Saint Columbkille, but until about 20 years ago it was also standard practice in Massachusetts public schools. Modern state education frameworks call only for students to be able to write legibly in print or cursive and to be able to sign their name. Given the demands of a 21 st century education, many schools have largely cut back on teaching cursive. Some have cut it out of the curriculum entirely.

"We are definitely going against the tide," said Saint Columbkille Head of School William Gartside. He grew up going to Catholic school, where he said he spent countless hours learning cursive. "My writing is not so good," he admitted, though he believes learning cursive writing has value.

"It trains the students to have a mind that's really attentive," he said. "It slows them down, it makes them more reflective."

Still, he said it's getting increasingly difficult to keep cursive in the curriculum.

"The tide's washing over the wall," he said. "In the 21 st century, you absolutely have to spend more attention [to] technology and also making sure students have art and physical education."

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In Holly Martin's third-grade class at Saint Columbkille in Brighton, the old-fashioned chalkboard has been replaced with an electronic screen. But Martin uses the screen to teach her students a concept older than the one-room school house: how to write in cursive.