Back in 2008 I had for a Head of English position. At one point during the morning, candidates were asked what aspect of English education was most important to them. I honestly have no memory of what I came up with, but I do remember another candidate saying that for him it was handwriting. He failed to make the cut.
Handwriting really doesn’t matter that much in most secondary schools. As long as pupils’ writing isn’t an illegible scrawl, teachers tend not to care too much about what it looks like. But this isn’t the case in primary schools. My daughters both have beautiful handwriting, and take real pride in making sure what they write looks good. And I’m impressed with this even though my own handwriting leaves something to be desired. I mean, it’s not like I don’t care, and it’s not as if looks like someone’s smudged a spider across the page, but beautiful it ain’t.
In last week’s post on Slow Writing, Hugo Kerr (author of a really excellent free e-book: The Cognitive Psychology of Literacy Teaching: Reading, Writing, Spelling, Dyslexia (& a bit besides)) got in touch to make a very interesting point about handwriting:
I teach literacy as a volunteer in primary school. All the kids I see are at basic level and all religiously join up their letters, at great cost in my view. The cognitive effort involved in joining up is obviously large and also obviously reduces capacity to think about the spellings themselves. I believe too much is being demanded too early. It is also striking that their tutor, me, does not, in fact, join his letters up. I think this is quite a big issue, in fact, acting to reduce kids’ confidence by deliberately enlarging the difficulties before them. I would be very interested in responses to this idea.
So I had a think. Could asking pupils to join up their writing possibility be a desirable difficulty that might have a beneficial impact on learning over the longer term? Or could this be a superfluous demand on working memory that might result in cognitive overload?
Hugo suggested that while we should be cautious when we bandy about terms like working or short term memory as we actually know precisely what they mean (he offered the looser term ‘cognitive capacity’) that, yes, maybe the need for cursive was placing an unnecessary burden on young writers. He also added this:
But I am also very sure that ‘affect’ is a huge factor. At the lower ends of achievement, at least, I think it is the largest by a country mile. You undoubtedly know that from the 1970s onwards ‘mathematics anxiety’ was a researched issue. When I am working in school I see enormous evidence of ‘literacy anxiety’ and it is obviously very important, though entirely overlooked…
Which makes adding a large and difficult cognitive task, like cursive writing, to an already rather difficult task in a highly competitive environment a costly affair, especially for the weaker students, and one we should revisit.
I’ve written about Hugo’s thoughts on the effect of affect before and agree that anxiety about being able to perform a task makes it much harder to complete that task with any degree of competency. Hugo also took the time to send a lengthier response via email which has agreed that I can share here:
It seems to me very clear that ‘my kids’’ writing behaviours show them struggling very considerably with joining up their letters per se. A great deal of their sometimes limited capacity for concentration seems to be directed at that fiddly, effortful and (to me) rather unnatural motor aspect of spelling. (I deploy the LCWC/SOS technique. Their learning therefore absolutely demands writing the words containing the pattern being learned. Most methods of learning spellings do, of course.)
Bear in mind these are the weaker readers, so they are wide open to demotivation, not to say humiliation, faced with these complicated squiggles, so ridiculous when considered in detail.
It seems to me self-evident that if cognitive capacity is so ferociously engaged in one domain, there will be correspondingly less of it available for the other domains we are actually interested in. This seems to me to be indisputable. If the acts associated with performing joined-up writing were allied to those demanded by the LCWC/SOS means of learning spellings, maybe there could be a useful coalition, but they do not seem to me to be related and, indeed, seem to me to be actually antagonistic.
If any of this is true, then it may be that we are fetishising joined up writing, or at least perhaps insisting upon it way too early? I find ‘joining up’ cumbersome and threatening (it looks a mess when I’m done; it feels clumsy and I feel stupid) and I think I remember this from school. I mostly don’t do joined up writing now. (Nor, of course, do most fonts. If it’s so cool, why not?)
Are we seeking to induce a fluent hand? If so, is there any evidence that that’s what is happening? I would very much doubt this, based on my subjective experience and observations in school. If it is doing this, it is quite cognitively and affectively expensive; is it cost-effective? (And the kids I get to teach are those for whom it is most expensive and intimidating, of course.)
Do adults actually do it? I am thinking about doing a small survey to see how much of adults’ writing is joined up and which letter patterns are, or aren’t, joined together. I only join up the easy, common patterns, ion, ing etc. How much ‘worse’ might we be if we had not been told to join up in youth?
Some letters, or combinations, differ in their shapes, of course, if they are joined up. Some letters, therefore, have to be learned in more than one form. At the stage where letters are being learned, this is probably quite a significant addition to the learning demanded; is it going to deliver sufficient to cover the extra cost (especially on the vulnerable weaker students)?
Some letter combinations are actually quite difficult to execute in joined up form. Capitals to subsequent letters, too.
Joined-up writing is not so simple, maybe?
What evidence is there that teaching joined-up writing early is necessary or useful? Would we know what it was aimed at? Do kids need to be taught any more than the basic stand-alone forms of letters? Can they not be allowed to develop fluency for themselves beyond the basic letter formation stages?
I am, as you can see, no expert. The evidence I have seen (not much proper stuff) seems to wash back and to quite a bit. But I think I am right to point to a high cognitive and affective cost for cursive writing, so if this has not previously been in the balance, maybe it is tipped a little unfairly to one side?
I have started a very small survey to collect samples of writing from school age and adult people. I am going to examine how much of it is performed in joined up writing and whether this relates reliably to particular patterns or combinations. I predict that many adults perform only some of their writing thus. If the kids do a greater proportion I think that might say significant things. I’ll let you know what I come up with, which won’t, of course, be of a rigorous standard!
None of this is to say that it’s unimportant to be able to write by hand. Clearly, pupils need to able to do it; in exams if nowhere else. But is too much time expended on teaching young children to use cursive handwriting? I’ve certainly not made up my mind on this and would be genuinely grateful for anyone, but particularly primary teachers, letting me know their thoughts on this.
http://www.picsxd.com/2010/11/funny-and-so-true-graphs.html
Further reading
As chance would have it, Ross McGill also blogged about handwriting recently. You can read his post here.
@mazst got in touch to suggest these articles:
What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain
Cursive Benefits Go Beyond Writing
As a primary teacher, cursive writing is the bane of my life. Our school insists upon it as there are marks available in Y6 SATs for using a joined font. As a left handed writer, I am completely unable to write in this font, and feel very uncomfortable in asking others to do so.
It’s interesting that these marks disappear as students enter KS3. Is this because they’re assumed to have mastered it or because it’s no longer important?
Here in the USA, I’d like to know what “Y6 SATs” are. We have an exam called the SAT, but ours (run by a testing organization in the USA) is an exam for high-school students who are making their plans for college.
Regardless — it strikes me as sheerly bonkers to give people higher marks for joining their letters. It is like giving people higher academic marks if they are six feet tall, or giving them higher academic marks if they don’t have allergies, or if they travel to the examination room by unicycle while juggling at least three pieces of authentic Wedgwood china.
In any case: /1/ What percentage of the letters must be joined, to qualify for those higher marks? Absolutely all of the letters? (which, I suppose, would mean that those who join only 50% of their letters are considered to be only 50% intelligent … Never mind that semi-joining is characteristic of the fastest and most legible handwriters. I would far rather live, work, and study with someone who can write legibly at a good speed than someone who consigns himself or herself to a lower speed and a greater risk of illegibility by making sure to join absolutely everything. The decorative — perhaps over-decorated —appearance of the results is no real compensation for the extra effort and, so to speak, lower return on one’s investment of said effort.
Regarding left-handers: I agree that certain joins are much more difficult with the left hand — unless, at least, certain adaptations in paper- and pen-position can be made: even these will not always be successful. The most difficult join for left-handers (even more than for right-handers) is probably that seen in the letter-pairs “sc” and “gh” when these are required to be joined — almost as difficult for most, if not all, left-handers is the join seen in “ci” and “cl” and “ol” (though this is usually easy for right-handers). Conversely, though, the join seen in “oi” and many other combinations out of “o” (and out of the crossbar of “f” or “t,” when this is used as a join) is actually easy for many of my left-handed students (but not for all of them: the reasons for this are rather complex and so, probably, would be uninteresting outside of a discussion among specialists.)
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than “printed” handwriting of equal or greater legibility. More recently, it has also been documented that cursive does NOT objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
Further research demonstrates that the fastest, clearest handwriters are neither the “print”-writers nor the cursive writers. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all of them – making only the simplest of joins, omitting the rest, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive matters, still — just because cursive exists where one cannot avoid the need to read it. However, even quite young children can be taught to read handwriting which is more complex than what they are taught or encouraged to produce? Reading cursive can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds, once they read ordinary print. (In fact, now there’s even an iPad app to teach how: named “Read Cursive,” of course — http://appstore.com/readcursive .) So why not simply teach children to _read_ cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, such as some handwriting style that’s actually typical of effective handwriters?
Educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers from all over North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority — 55 percent — wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling “print”-writing, others resembling cursive. When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why mandate it?
Cursive’s cheerleaders sometimes allege that cursive makes you smarter, or nicer, or beautifully graceful — that it adds brain cells — or instills proper etiquette, grammar, and patriotism — or confers other blessings which are in fact no more frequently found among cursive’s learners and users than among the rest of us. Some devotees of cursive allege that research supports their notions — citing studies that consistently prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident when others examine the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no traceable source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, it is misquoted or is incorrectly described (e.g., an Indiana University research study comparing print-writing with keyboarding is perennially misrepresented by cursive’s defenders as a study “comparing print-writing with cursive”),
or
/3/ the claimant _correctly_ quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
What about signatures? Here in the USA, at least — where children grow up being told by their elders that “signatures require cursive to be legal” — cursive signatures in fact have no special legal validity over any other kind. (This is quite surprising to the occasional well-meaning schoolteacher who finds out that one of her students is the child of an attorney, and who asks that parent to visit the class and “please help me make sure that the students know the law requires cursive for signatures”!
You would think that the teachers would have learned better, by now —but more than a few of them have quite calmly said to me, and presumably to anyone else who ventures to inform them upon the subject, that they would far rather misinform children in their care about the law of the land than provide correct information which threatened in any way the classroom reverence paid to writing with every letter joined up and variously re-shaped as necessary in order to make that possible.
I suspect that questioned document examiners (specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) must run into the same teacherly stubbornness if they ever tell a teacher what they tell me: namely, that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest (including the “print-written” ones).
Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All writing, not just cursive, is individual — just as all writing involves fine motor skills. That is why any teacher of small children can immediately identify (from the “print-writing” on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive in order to preserve the skill of handwriting resembles mandating tall silk hats and lace petticoats in order to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3 Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Handwriting research on cursive’s lack of observable benefit for students with dyslexia/dysgraphia:
“Does cursive handwriting have an impact on the reading and spelling performance of children with dyslexic dysgraphia: A quasi-experimental study.” Authors: Lorene Ann Nalpon & Noel Kok Hwee Chia — URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/234451547_Does_cursive_handwriting_have_an_impact_on_the_reading_and_spelling_performance_of_children_with_dyslexic_dysgraphia_A_quasi-experimental_study
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
http://youtu.be/3kmJc3BCu5g
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
http://youtu.be/s_F7FqCe6To
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
http://youtu.be/Od7PGzEHbu0
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
handwritingrepair@gmail.com • HandwritingThatWorks.com
Wow! Thanks for this – it’ll take some time to sort through all this but I really appreciate the effort you’ve gone to – I’m sure Hugo will too 🙂
I totally agree – in Secondary education legibility is all we are after. I’ve recently had to work individually with two very gifted A-Level English students because you just can ‘t read their beautifully looped and fluid handwriting! The large lead in to certain letters just confuses the reader and the tall strokes with loops could be d,t,l – I had no idea. Speaking to them, they were taught these lovely looking, impossible to read styles at primary school – maybe there, where words and sentences were generally shorter and less complex, teachers could decifer it but now, when discussing A- level poetry, I didn’t have a clue.
So learning cursive could be actively harmful?
At KS2 it is important to have joined writing in order to achieve the higher levels so schools and teachers have to push pupils to join. This requirement disappears at KS3 which is why secondary teachers focus more on legibility. My own two children have struggled to join up and I have long thought that it has been detrimental to the content and presentation of their writing. Great to hear I’m not the only one who is sceptical about the benefits of continuous cursive.
You’re right about the marks. Why do you think cursive is rewarded at KS1 & 2?
I can’t explain it – to me it seems to be based on an irrational belief that the ability to produce neat joined up writing is the same as the ability to write interesting compositions that use language and language structure well. It seems to prioritise an idea of what good writing literally looks like rather than what it says. Thank goodness it’s dropped by KS3.
Handwriting! One of those ‘light the blue touchpaper and write to “The Times” subjects.’ The call for evidence is timely, but that won’t stop me airing my views. Half of my thirty teaching years were spent in primary (including middle deemed primary) and handwriting was always high on the agenda. My first head teacher drilled into me that I must take a half hour handwriting lesson with the whole class every single morning, and it must involve joining exercises and aim to produce an attractive stand-alone page, made of lines of joined letters, individual words and patterns. A lesson I carried with me eventually into middle school headship. She also pointed out that handwriting is not just about letter shapes, but, importantly, about movement and rhythm — the flow of the hand across the page. Joins, of course, are an essential part of this. Without joins, where is the flow? A head to whom I spoke only last week, someone very committed to technology, explained that handwriting is a priority at his school, the aim being to achieve ‘automaticity’ — the thoughts transferring to the page without conscious mental effort. (Which is my definition of touch typing incidentally)
One of the most influential handwriting schemes was devised by the legendary Thirties art teacher Marion Richardson. It was hugely influential right into the eighties, because it moved away from the loops that were the bane of those of us who learned with steel pens and inkwells (loops too easily became blobs) and yet retained a consistent and logical system of joins. Now, if Twitter is anything to go by, nobody has heard of her.
There must, of course, be a relationship between handwriting method and reading. OK, I defy anyone to explain what the link is, but the concept of flow must figure in it somewhere.
Thanks Gerald – just to be clear, you’re arguing that this time spent on handwriting is valuable> Even in the cases Hugo outlines?
And now you’ve got me thinking about possible handwriting/reading connections….
@SusanGodsland pointed me in the direction of this: http://www.dyslexics.org.uk/handwriting.htm
Time spent on handwriting valuable? It was always just embedded for me, so the question didn’t arise. Similarly I see handwriting as, by definition, ‘joined up’. If an adult presents handwriting with no joins it’s frowned upon is it not? Called ‘printing’. Not good in a job application?
I do think that critics of cursive haven’t really accepted the importance of seeing handwriting as movement, not the creation of of individual static shapes. Even talking about this makes you do the movements in the air as you speak. See? You’re doing it right now!
It’s an interesting point Gerald, but I wasn’t! The idea of forming joined up letters in the air feels quite alien to me. But maybe that speaks of a lack in me?
If joining were the _sine_qua_non_ of movement flow and movement, every cursive handwriting would grind to a half and lose all flow whenever a word was written and the pen lifted in its movement towards the next word.
To lift the pen between strokes, or letters, is not destructive of flow — or need not be.
Regarding employment applications and the like: I’d rather have an employee who wrote legibly, rapidly, and in a manner which resists decay at speed than have an employee who (however legibly) write in an ornate manner which decayed rapidly and markedly as speed increased.
Re:
“Joins, of course, are an essential part of this. Without joins, where is the flow?”
The flow — the motion between letters — need not be limited to the pen’s contact with the paper. Many of the modern italic methods encourage having the hand remain in motion — NO grinding to a halt! — between strokes, between letters, and between words: in other words, whether the motion is on the paper, or off the paper.
Think of a stone which one throws to skim the surface of a lake. We would not say that the the skimming stone, whenever it’s just above the water, has ceased to move — we recognize that the stone continues its flight whether it happens to be upon the water’s surface or just above it. In the same way, the hand and pen can keep moving — can flow — whether the pen nib and ink are upon the paper, or momentarily just above the paper as the pen skims that surface. Resources for learning such handwriting — which may be though of as “print-writing taught to flow” — abound here: http://www.BFHhandwriting.com, http://www.handwritingsuccess.com, http://www.briem.net, http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com, http://www.italic-handwriting.org, http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html
If you seek people today who have heard of Marion Richardson (and who highly respect her work), these include a teacher of mine, here in the United States — Nan Jay Barchowsky — and, in the UK, eminent handwriting teacher/author Rosemary Sassoon: who wrote a biography of Richardson. Either one is easy to Google, by accompanying the same with the word “handwriting.”
[…] The curse of cursive: Are we fetishising joined up writing? by @LearningSpy […]
Incidentally, I, too, once had an interview for a head of English post. The head interviewed me on his own, on a separate day from the others. Within ten minutes we’d agreed that I just didn’t have enough knowledge to teach A Level literature. (That subject knowledge thing you see!) We had a nice lunch instead, and reminisced about college days.
Here are my thoughts based on my experiences:
Like anything in education, issues are often a ‘chicken and egg’ scenario.
Without a doubt, there are probably millions of pupils/people (including teachers themselves) struggling with forming speedy joined handwriting, or who have abandoned, or never got to grips with, well-formed joined handwriting – or joined handwriting at all.
What would the case be, however, if all teachers were really good at teaching and modelling handwriting: print from the outset, followed by a fully joined style at a stage when learners have become competent with spelling and expressing themselves reasonably independently (around 6 to 8 years old)?
I find teaching handwriting very easy – and have great success in teaching it – both print and fully joined. I find it easy because of years of experience of teaching and valuing the importance of a teacher, being able to teach effectively in a time-efficient way, this particular skill. I am committed to the teaching of good handwriting – print and fully joined – for so many reasons.
I have also had great success with teaching fully joined handwriting to older pupils when their handwriting is actually in a bit of a mess – a form of print or semi-print writing with all sorts of muddled up ‘directionality’ and formation. In fact, the act of teaching joined handwriting ‘from the beginning’ has actually enabled them to transform very rapidly from a very poor print writer with infantile (at best) looking handwriting to a very mature-looking fully joined handwriting style.
I hope that everyone has the capacity to imagine the potential for seriously raising self-esteem for a young person if that person’s handwriting capacity has changed dramatically from the infantile, rather clumsy, chaotic-looking handwriting to a relatively neat and sophisticated script.
Imagine the change in self-perception – and imagine the change in other people’s perception on examining a page of clear, joined, well-formed script in comparison to an infantile script – commonly chaotic (very common). I suggest that this should not be underestimated.
So, then everyone who reads this who does not write with such a script may well question the necessity and whether this is a somewhat ‘outdated’ perspective.
I suggest that this scenario may appear outdated to some for a number of reasons – one being that the teaching of handwriting is often simply not effective, overly time-consuming, not sustained or not successful across whole classes of children – and we may well have a generation of primary teachers who themselves have poor handwriting, idiosyncratic pen/pencil grips, and who are actually poor at the teaching of handwriting (and often presentation on a page generally).
Further, we probably have many teachers in secondary schools with idiosyncratic handwriting styles who are not in a position to criticise the style or quality of their pupils’ handwriting because their own handwriting is so very poor. Having had four of my own children pass through the secondary sector, I can vouch for this according to the marking and report-writing I have witnessed over the past 20 years!
This raises a number of questions. How fit are teachers to model and teach handwriting? How well-trained are they? Are they trained at all?
In terms of writing style, this is not just about ‘style’ but also about the teaching of any style. The two issues go hand in hand in a teaching context.
For example, a handwriting ‘programme’ which goes on and on, slowly introducing the various joins is arguably unnecessarily protracted and does not enable a quick uptake of the joined handwriting style. This may mean that at least some children only practise the joins in the actual handwriting lessons – and there may well be a disconnect between the handwriting lessons and handwriting in the wider curriculum.
Then there is a case of ‘high-expectations’. It is not enough for teachers to have high expectations if they don’t also have the training, understanding and wherewithal to teach and support the handwriting in the first place.
In the western context, primary classrooms are invariably organised with groups of tables, young children are invariably taught some handwriting with mini whiteboards sitting or lying on the floor – not a great start – not totally fit-for-purpose. Are such organisational features such as these ideal for helping children sort out their left-rightness, and their organisational skills on a piece of paper or page, and their comfort and posture at a desk.
If children have to twist around from their sitting positions at grouped tables, does this help them with their handwriting style? How many children hook their wrists right around and write from ‘above’ their words and not ‘below’?
I know categorically that we could teach handwriting MUCH better, much more economically in time, for ALL the children, if we had some fit-for-purpose training and better techniques.
Finally, I was once asked to talk to secondary teachers about handwriting as it was a huge issue in this particular school so I did my bit to a very defensive staff as you can imagine.
The chemistry teacher stated he wrote entirely in capital letters and what did it matter whether the pupils could write in joined handwriting or not – after all, he didn’t!
I had to think on my feet but it was very helpful and I likened the situation to how we might hold a knife and fork (something else that people may think does not matter nowadays).
It’s about choices. If I, as a parent, don’t teach my own children to manage the food on their plates with some degree of skill, dexterity, reasonable elegance – then I deprive them of their own choices when they mature. In a sense, we do have values based on the minutiae – holding cutlery and managing it with some finesse, handwriting of various styles.
I want ALL the children, young people, who pass through our education system to have CHOICES. To help them with those choices, I believe that to discharge my duty as a teacher, I should have taught them print-writing very well when they are infants – and when they can spell, write and express themselves, I want to teach them a fully joined handwriting script (which I know how to do very quickly and efficiently) which will set them up with CHOICES for the rest of their lives.
They may well find it quicker and easier to develop their own style – often part print, part joined I have no doubt – but when the occasion arises when they want, or maybe need, to present their application form, or a love letter (or whatever) to impress someone, they have the choice and capability.
Finally, if as teachers we can help young people gain some satisfaction from presenting their many projects and written work, charts, drawings and diagrams etc. in a very visually pleasing way, then this will help them to take a pride in their work – even when they do not enjoy the subject perhaps.
This, I suggest, truly should be an important part of our remit.
Brilliant! Thank you Debbie. So to sum up: We need to be better at teaching handwriting?
I agree that handwriting instruction should be carefully directed and supervised. I do not agree that relentless joining of every letter in every word is the only, or even the best, way to make this happen. My own preference would be to start with a separate-letters style designed to encourage fluency and good directionality (by using shapes such as ovals, rather than circles: to achieve a specific shape of oval, the pen needs to take a specific direction). Then show students how to determine what joins, and how many of them, work best for each person (this varies among persons, and can change as one grows up — so is best taught as a simple process for evaluating whether or not a given join at a given moment is proving legible and rapid in one’s own writing) … and, concurrently, teach everyone how to READ completely joined handwriting (such teaching takes an hour or less, and can be done by machine: as noted in an earlier message). It needs to be accepted that different people will have different “best amounts” of joining: rather than “join everything” or “join nothing,” one should be encouraged to find that proportion of joining which one can best and most pleasingly accomplish.
Just a brief observation – with nothing to say about the link between cursive script and learning – but anyway…I was on an exchange visit in France just last weekend. There was still some (beautifully done) teacher’s cursive script on the board – in chalk. He explained that they do an awful lot of chalk-and-talk with the children copying from year 1. We looked at the writing of a (randomly chosen) six year old’s work and the cursive script was indeed already very clear. The three primary school teachers with me were astonished.
How wonderful to read real evidence. I could never have found the tenth of it. I shall ponder what I am, in practice, to do now! If I am to help people learn spelling patterns, can I ask the school whether, for 30 minutes, they can be allowed to write their letters how they like?
Legibility is assuredly not the same as cursive style. It is fascinating to find that, although ‘flow’ is desirable perhaps, fluency is no greater using cursive style than the hybrid style which, in my view, is likely to develop whatever we do.
Just for interest: Hugo, do you have several styles of handwriting – or different styles you could call upon if the occasion called upon it?
For example, I have a truly hybrid scruffy note-style hand, a neat somewhat artistic style which is the expression of ‘me’ the individual, I have a print style and fully joined style which I would teach in a primary school – and I would use only the joined style for remediation in a secondary school to provide those choices and raise self-esteem and self-perception.
Do you think that there is a case for a ‘time and place’ approach?
To my astonishment, I have the experience of a number of young teachers who have watched me teach handwriting to classes of children – and who have approached me afterwards literally thrilled to take on board what I have been teaching the youngsters.
They have told me their tales of never having been taught specifically of how to hold an implement with the tripod grip or how to write in a good joined handwriting style.
They are simply not equipped to teach youngsters having these poor experiences themselves.
So, we have a self-fulfilling scenario – teachers who were not taught well enough now having to teach children themselves.
This issue of ‘personalisation’ has gone far too far – and it is more a case of some form of educational neglect.
If you look around many, if not most, primary schools in England, you will nowadays see some horrific pencil holds, poor posture – beyond idiosyncratic and ‘personal’ to virtually grotesque in some cases.
Does anyone really think this is good enough? Have we discharged our duties well enough in such a basic requirement?
And if we were parents looking around a suitable school for our children, would we be impressed with schools if it was their policy to ‘teach’ children to have these personal writing styles which are bordering on grotesque in many cases?
What would the parents really prefer?
[…] has been a recent spate of posts on handwriting, here (from @teachertoolkit), here (from @learningspy) and, the one that originally caught my eye a few months back, here (from […]
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Children of 6 -7 who are struggling readers often cannot handle cursive writing unless it’s taught properly. Memories of a smart 7 year -old going round and round in circles as he didn’t know where/how to form the exit flick. Lots of children turning ‘b”d’into an amorphous blob in order to disguise their confusion. Once handwriting sorted and they understood how letter/s relate to sound, progress was speedy.
Maybe middle of year 1 a good time to introduce cursive? Debbie is the expert here.
No, I think my style is pretty consistent. Sometimes I am in more haste, so less legible, but it don’t have a style for posh!
My distrust of the value of cursive is not to be taken as condoning giving up on the teaching of writing legibly, of course. Clearly people need to be helped to understand and perform letters. I wonder what would happen if we left it at that?
David – good blog.
We recently had a consultant into school who told us that cursive writing should be taught from day one and that handwriting was poor across the school. However, this is counter to my experience. I taught in another school previously and reading levels in reception were terrible because the children were learning cursive letters, while every reading book they read was written in printed script. They simply could not recognise the letter when they were printed. their handwriting was great, but his sidelined the most important skill they needed to learn at that stage, namely reading. While I am in favour of children using joined up handwriting (because the evidence shows that if this becomes automatic then they can concentrate more on content than actually writing) we have to be pragmatic in asking children to do it.
Cheers
I just had a conversation about handwriting with a very experienced primary teacher (27 years KS1/2 always in the classroom) who is, shall we say, very well known to me. Much of what she said challenges my ideas and supports what others have written here. ‘It’s a motor skill that has nothing to do with literacy’. (Not sure I agree with that. I’m sure there must be a connection.) She feels that some teachers spend an inordinate amount of time on handwriting not for its own sake but in pursuit of a very few SAT marks. She’s also worried — as are other commenters here — by seeing children who struggle with literacy being distracted by the effort of trying to get their joins right. She utterly rejects my point about adult handwriting on the grounds that nobody does it, not even in job applications. (So I’m out of date there. Seems only yesterday that a job application had to be handwritten.)
I’m so proud that this teacher, who I waved off to college in 1983, has developed such expertise, dedication and confidence – and a level of pedagogic skill that far exceeds anything I could ever lay claim to. That said, I still think that, at some level, maybe waiting to be explored, the movement and flow of joined handwriting has its effect on language, just as I’m sure that well taught physical education (and I don’t mean games lessons) affects learning. So much that teachers feel in their bones still has to be explored and explained.
One thing that annoys me is seeing children — or teenagers, or adults — being told that their written work in any subject CANNOT be good in content or reasoning if its handwriting is poor.
I was one of the children who was told that I could not be nearly as intelligent or diligent or attentive as was suggested by the content, logic, or grammar of any written or oral work in any subject because “nobody who could actually do work of that intellectual quality could possibly have such bad handwriting as yours” — therefore, since I could not be proven to have cheated I would be marked poorly unless I confessed to that crime (which I had not committed).
Just to clarify, I don’t recommend children being taught cursive from the outset – far from it.
Teach print first, and teach it well.
Print works really well with early phonics teaching – linking sounds with letter shapes -and I agree that when children are young they are reading ‘print’ and there is no need to confuse the issue.
Sometimes teachers argue along the lines of ‘what’s the point’ of teaching print only to have to re-teach fully cursive but this misses the point that, actually, children benefit from being able to print even when they are taught cursive from the outset. They need both styles.
I am being challenging – I admit it.
We need to be better as a nation to teach handwriting well – print first is my recommendation.
Too often, as a profession, teachers look to ‘within child’ difficulties when children don’t learn well enough – or get in a muddle – rather than looking to the content and quality, or ‘order’ of the teaching.
As teachers, we need to set out with a mindset that we are going to improve over a lifetime’s teaching experience, then what do people find who have taught for a lifetime already?
Too often, I suggest, teachers muddle up the issue of them teaching their heart out on the one hand – but teaching ineffectively on the other.
In other words, just because teachers work so very, very hard, doesn’t automatically mean that they teach very, very well.
That is the beauty of all these amazing blogs nowadays – teachers willing to unpick the issues and share conversations about teaching effectiveness.
Let me give you an example of muddled thinking (in my view):
The other day I watched a video featuring Tim Oates who was describing the various reasons why national curriculum ‘levels’ have been abandoned.
One of the reasons he gave was the worry that children may dangerously perceive themselves by ‘their level’ rather than by the person they are.
I was so frustrated. This was the wrong way around.
Children would not perceive themselves by their level if the teachers had not created this scenario in the first place.
In other words, it is the teachers who have labelled the children by their levels – and it is the adults who have created this scenario leading to the point where the children THEN perceive themselves as a ‘level’.
I went into a school to do a training event recently – a school horrendously under pressure – people leaving (teachers and pupils) the sinking ship.
Some hard-working teacher had created a stunningly neat, well-produced main display of giant stars with left-to-right national curriculum levels for maths and literacy.
The children’s names were then within the stars according to their levels in these subjects.
Imagine, the immorality of the children who were languishing in the ‘level 1s’ whilst all their peers were over towards the high 2s and level 3.
What have we come to.
I have always refused to tell primary children ‘their level’ – it is not right – but my goodness I have worked my socks off to support teachers to teach children effectively across the board.
My point is this, why is it that we are still having experienced teaching professionals looking always to ‘the children’ or ‘the learners’ and very rarely do the conversations start with ‘How are we responsible for this?’
I have gone into school after school and taken the child (usually a boy) languishing with his special needs teaching assistant, and in a minute or so demonstrated to the boy (and his TA and teachers) that he can write virtually identically to me – my writing that I have done for him.
There – his attention is grabbed – he didn’t know he could do it – neither did anyone else – because he never had.
This is why I’m passionate about my basic skills literacy work – people don’t know what they don’t know.
And I’ll roll my sleeves up and show people again and again what is possible.
But I am in a world of people who don’t believe these things – because they’re too busy accepting the status quo and looking for within-child reasons or excuses.
To all who are asking “Well, what can we do, when we as teachers are required to do something (with regard to handwriting) that we know or believe to be destructive?” —
I ask in return: “Well, what would you do if, let us say, you were teaching arithmetic and you were officially required to teach that two and two made five, or that addition was the same thing as division, or that the answer to any question of mathematics depended on the teacher’s favorite color and the day of the week?”
Sooner or later, in either circumstance, one faces the choice of either teaching to order, or TEACHING.
I do not know whether those who are in authority, and those who pay their wages, should be more frightened of the teacher who will not teach to order, when the order is unwise — or of the teacher who _will_ so teach.
Re the two articles mentioned by @mazst —
Both articles turn out to rely upon misquoted (and otherwise misrepresented) research. This becomes evident, regarding both articles, when one reads the extensive and vociferous comment-threads attached to each, especially to the first one.
Many commenters on the first article — and several commenters on the second article — went so far as to _actually_ _look_ _up_ the research which the author was citing, and to note the discrepancies between the actual research and its representation by the author of the article that claimed that research as support.
With regard to the first article (“What Cursive Does to your Brain”), it soon became evident that its author (a prominent veterinary neurosurgeon) had not in fact _read_ the original research before deciding to present it as support for his beliefs. What he had read, as he eventually admitted in comments of his own, had been another writer’s summary of the research: and that writer’s own summary had been itself written to accord with the writer’s position on cursive, which he was working very hard to promote. (In fact — by the end of the series of comments, those made by author of “What Cursive Does to your Brain” had made at least one comment retracting his earlier position and admitting that the research in fact dies not say what he had been misled into asserting it had said.)
How very telling it is that any teachers might ‘know or believe’ that teaching handwriting is, or can be, destructive.
It has only been a positive experience in my experience – and I have so many examples of learners’ delight at their own practice, their own achievement – and their change in self-perception as they see their handwriting quickly transform.
If teachers have had negative experiences when they were children – such as struggling with learning a handwriting style, or writing neatly, or being told something negative and destructive – that suggests that they were not taught well or by right-thinking teachers.
If teachers then allow their views on the teaching of handwriting to be a consequence of negative childhood experiences, then this is a sad state of affairs.
What a pity that such teachers did not all become all the more determined to be good, effective and kind teachers of handwriting – rather than to decry or question the need, indeed professional duty, to teach handwriting and to teach it well.
I note a reference here to a small survey of handwriting, apparently in progress. Would the person doing that survey care to reach me, perhaps to have the survey and its results noted in my handwriting web-site? Actually, I would like even better to work with you and make that survey a larger one — worldwide — by using my web-site to ask people to participate (and by making it possible for people to submit their answers through my web-site? Would this be agreeable to you? My web-site is http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com — my e-mail is handwritingrepair@gmail.com — if you wish to respond regarding this, please send me an e-mail with the words “handwriting survey” somewhere in it.
Hi Kate,
I am doing a tiny and non-rigorous survey. It will carry almost no authority, but will be a little indicative! I have emailed.
I received your e-mail and tried to respond to it: but the message bounced back as “addressee unknown” (common with messages sent from my service provider to yours. Sometimes, but not always, the intended recipient will say that the message arrived despite the bounce notice). Do you have another e-mail address?
When your survey is done, would you please either post the results and any comments (so that I can link to it/them), or — if you prefer — permit me to post the results (along with any comments I may see fit to make)?
Further, would it help you (in your dealings with the school) if I referred you to various resources for the teaching of fluent letter patterns WITHOUT cursive?
Hi Kate,
No, I only have the one email address. How infuriating!
Re resources for teaching without cursive: I am not at all sure what the school response would be. I am a volunteer reading support worker who comes in two afternoons a week and I can see the school getting restive if I try telling them how to do their job! I think I will ask whether ‘my kids’ can be allowed to write non-cursive while with me. Even that is likely to raise hackles, I fear. If the kids do opt for less cursive, it will be interesting to see whether there is any detectable effect, of course.
Yes, if my mini-survey gets completed I will post here.
One further observation: I taught adult literacy for many, many years. At no time did cursive arise as an ambition or issue. So far as I recall, most students did not use cursive any more than is usual, although I believe most will have been taught to do this. Nobody in ABE ever suggested we should teach cursive, and it never crossed my, or anyone else’s mind so to do. Students learned to write, and spell, well and quickly. I do not think teaching cursive would have helped.
It seems that the new curriculum won’t allow schools to decide whether or when to teach joined up handwriting as it is expected to be the norm for pupils at the age of 7. I know thats not stipulating a style of joined up handwriting such as cursive handwriting.
A school in an Ofsted category received its termly s8 inspection last month and the HMI focused heavily on handwriting, how pupils were holding their pencils etc and he blamed the bad habits he was seeing on poor standards in writing in UKS2.
7! Us Brits seem to be savage towards our little ones! I don’t think joined up writing by that age is a reasonable demand. 7 is tiny.
I just want to say I’ve learned lots from this blog and the associated comments and my ideas have been considerably tweaked. I’m particularly taken by those who correct me by suggesting that the concept of ‘flow’ does not necessarily imply continuous movement of the hand. That makes a lot of sense now I think about it, especially as, once upon a long time, I was a devotee of italic. I’d really like to know more, though, about what I believe must be a real link between physical movement and cognition. Maybe it’s playing the piano that causes me to think that. Then there’s Makaton, which I know from experience aids memorisation (used it with children’s choirs) Could argue that Makaton is a form of aerial handwriting?
What’s Makaton?
[…] https://www.learningspy.co.uk/literacy-2/curse-cursive-fetishising-joined-writing/ […]
Well, I have carried out my small survey into cursive writing. I hope nobody has been holding their breath…
I asked ten people (to date) to write out the following ditty:
I’m doing work on literacy, so could you write these words for me?
And yes indeed, before you ask, there is good reason for this task.
The figures of most interest were the percentage of possible unions between letters which were actually made. There were 76 potential joined-up letters in my ditty (I’m is exceptional – and nobody joined these two). The adults (7 of them) joined between 32 and 80 % of possibles. Actual figures were 32, 39, 46, 53, 62, 72 & 80. There was no obvious age or gender bias.
The children (3 of them aged 8, 9 & 11) were more interesting. The youngest and the oldest are sisters at the same school in the north of England, the 9 year old is at a west London school. This latter child has been taught cursive but only actually united just under 50% of potentially joined up letters. I have the feeling she used to join up more assiduously, but is now a very fluent writer and developing a style.
The two former girls joined almost no letters at all (1 &4%) so are presumably not required so to do at school. This seems odd in view of the remark a correspondent here wrote stating that KS2 SATS awarded points for a cursive style. The 11 year old joined letters ri (in write) and th (in these and this) in a way which leads me to think she is developing her own, idiosyncratic, cursive occasional style, and is not following taught practice.
All 3 girls are fluent, happy writers.
I did say it was a small survey! I have quite a few samples ‘out’ still and if anything more substantial happens along will report.
My conclusions are that if cursive was taught to the adults, its effects have pretty much washed out. There is small consistency as to which letters are or are not joined. And the ‘hands’ I examined seemed highly idiosyncratic. I think we have a very strong tendency to develop our own style, and trying to gainsay this is probably futile. Since I think it is very cognitively and affectively expensive, I think the demanding of cursive is not defensible.
A fascinating blog and topic. My viewpoint is informed by one of my less enviable tasks as a UK local authority consultant (yes, there are a few of us left!): KS2 writing moderation. With this hat on, I have read pages and pages of writing by Year 6 pupils in the last two weeks. The writing has been moderated at low level 3 to high level 6 and in only once instance was handwriting an issue, and that was when illegibility was actually the issue. On this basis, I would suggest that – in the real world – handwriting styles matter not a jot in writing compared to richness of vocabulary, development of detail and matching of voice to purpose, audience and task. It follows that there are no hard and fast rules: some children may benefit from cursive training which might support the develop of automaticity of thought and spelling; others will do better with a printed style which may or may not develop into a semi-joined hand, in time. As in most other areas of classroom practice therefore, the skill of the teacher in teaching handwriting in a way which supports expression of ideas is in knowing which pupils will benefit most from what support or intervention.
I wonder if some common patterns, like, say, ion, ing, ed and digraphs like, say, er, or, wr might benefit from cursive attack early on? Some groupings are, after all, almost individual graphemes. In my tiny and not at all rigorous survey, though, it was striking how some respondents did, and some didn’t, join up common unions. The range and inconsistency was enormous. Some common unions, after a fashion, included th. Here the pen was always lifted after the down stroke of the t, but often the cross stroke continued into the next letter. This was not what they were taught to do, I think, but a personally developed short cut?
Yes, and would you agree that most writers do develop a similar range of such short cuts because of the frequency of certain prefixes, suffixes, digraphs, trigraphs and (as my 6 year old would remind me!) quadgraphs. I think the approach you describe is built into most synthetic phonics programmes. Once these patterns are established for learners, it becomes a matter of teaching exceptions. All of which begs the question: aren’t we now talking more about teaching spelling than handwriting?
I’m only a limited fan of phonics, at least as mandated exclusively, but let’s not go there today! I would like to say that I believe handwriting/writing and spelling are inextricably linked. The spelling is the doing and the doing is the spelling. I don’t think you can learn one without the other.
I agree that people develop patterns of squiggles for the really common letter groupings. The actual letters in my ing and ion have disappeared long ago. But I think using cursive for common patterns or groupings might make them easier to memorise.
Why spend so much time on handwriting and virtually none on typing when 99% of output will be from a keyboard. Bit of an irony to say they need it for exams when exams are a means to an end not an end in themselves.
I don’t advocate spending ‘so much time on handwriting’ – just teach it well.
I also think we should teach touch-typing well and for everyone.
As a parent of boys who have been unfortunate enough to be taught to write during this current cursive fad, I would like to applaud this discussion. Both my boys learned to form their letters well and printed neatly, accurately and at a reasonable speed for their age. Then they arrived in year 2 and suddenly they were expected to develop the ability to write cursive and join every letter correctly at the tender age of 6/7 years old. Result? Within a year of being forced to write cursive, the clarity of their handwriting has deteriorated dramatically. My eldest son is now in year 7. His handwriting has become so illegible that I have actually asked his school if they can advise on the best way to help him improve his handwriting, so that he has some time to work on it, before he is faced with GCSEs. These exams won’t be marking him on his handwriting, but if the examiner cannot decipher his handwriting, he will be in danger of losing marks for that. I have seriously considered teaching both my boys to write at home and ban them from attempting to join any letters up until they have rediscovered the ability to print fully formed legible letters that they had before. I was even prepared to make a stand with my youngest son’s primary school and inform them that he was not to participate in handwriting lessons as I didn’t believe in the method they have chosen to teach, but felt I might be seen as one of “those mothers”. Having read this blog and the comments following it, I’m now feeling that perhaps I’m not as precious and picky a parent as I suspect the school would have me believe if I pursue this line. It’s heartening to see that there are some people in education who are still prepared to question the status quo. After all, that’s a big part of learning, is it not?
I know that I am late in your discussion, but I wonder if you teach joined up letters, first? All of the research I have studies, including looking back to Marjorie Wise, seems to point to wanting students to have a fluid handwriting. This seems to be the reason that she, perhaps, at least partially, recanted her position on handwriting. I see young students being taught joined up/cursive handwriting first, as a benefit. Teaching them joined letters/ cursive right as they are needing to write more, seems to be counterproductive. In France and other countries that teach joined up/cursive first, I wonder if there is still a debate as to whether print should be taught before. I saw a student’s handwriting from India, the other day, who had the most beautiful cursive. When I asked the student what age he was taught, he said that he was taught at 6 years old. I have another student I know that taught himself the font that has the little circle in the middle of each letter, that taught himself out of an old handwriting book from England, at 6 years old. His handwriting was beautiful, and then he was taught by our schools, and now he has just normal handwriting. I have also read that writing cursive when learning sounds to read helps with blending the sounds. I taught my own son cursive first, and I can say that he had no problem “unjoining” his letters for print later.
the fact is, Cursive was never truly useful in the form that was taught in schools, and modern developments have made it even less useful then it once was. I am not opposed to the people who want to learning cursive, but when you put something in the schools, you use the government to mandate that everyone learn it regardless of if they can do it, have any interist in it, or skill with it, or see any use for it at all. Cursive must disappear from the classroom. cursive is no more relevant then Latin (and much less interesting too), and it amounts to the inflection of severe pain on many people. CURSIVE SHOULD BE AN ELECTIVE ONLY. there are just not enough good reasons for it to be compulsory, but there more then enough for it to be offered, on the understanding and acceptance of the fact that many people will say no, but the interested will say yes. of course, I am a believer in the principle of a society that values freedom, so my default position on everything is that people are allowed to do something if they want to, but under no circumstance should they be mandated to do it; I require significant evidence to sway from that position, indeed if that is not how you are, there is no place for you in a society that values freedom. but anyway, Cursive has no role in modern life, and by the time anyone who is in school now is old enough to be employed, it will have even less of one. Education must prepare people for the world they live in, not an idealized fiction loosely based on the world their great great grandparents lived in.
my arguments against cursive include:
I. cursive takes forever to master, and some never will no matter hard they try
II. cursive is impossible to write good enough (and I define something as being written ‘good enough’ when it has been written correctly point where the letters are recognizable, though written imperfectly), cursive has to be perfected before it can be written legibly even to those who can read it, bad cursive may as well be doodles, and many people will never get good at cursive
III. some cursive letters look so different from what people see in books, on the internet, or in handwritten print that I think that Greek or Cyrillic (Russian) alphabet letters are more obviously some type of letter then cursive is; this is true of even well written cursive; poorly written cursive (I. E. what most people who learn cursive because of education mandates wind up with) is indistinguishable from scribbles
IV. to many people; myself included, even attempting cursive amounts to the gratuitous inflection of severe physical pain; I am 100% serious when I say that I would rather be waterboarded then write cursive. the possibility of inflicting serious physical pain would be not much of a problem if it was only done voluntarily, but when something is mandated in the education system, you have people who do not want to do it being forced to.
V. too many cursive letters look like each other, making them hard to distinguish; which is of course harmful to anyone trying to read anything
VI. cursive only has advantages if your preferred writing instrument is a feather dipped in ink. I doubt the biggest cursive proponent has ever written with a feather and ink, and certainly does not do so regularly. not lifting the pen may be an advantage with feather and ink because those are hard to lift, can break easily, and can splatter ink all over; but no modern writing instrument has those properties. not lifting the pen slows you down because of the friction from the paper, and also having to go the same distances, and sometimes trace it. cursive became obsolete when the ballpoint pen was invented, that was in the late 1880s if you are wondering. you wanna talk about outdated
VI. cursive makes it so that you get tiered so much quicker
VII. even most people who learn cursive abandon it the second it stops being required; which suggests there are a lot of better uses for everyone’s time
VIX. cursive makes dyslexia far far worse, in part because you can no longer make out the distinct letters. I think cursive set me back months in literacy.
X. cursive is slower, harder and less legible then print. print letter shapes are undeniably simpler, which makes them faster, easier and more legible, as well as requiring fewer strokes to write.
XI. handwriting is less necessary in the modern age in general, though to be honest I find this less compelling the above arguments, but why are we teaching 2 forms of something when it is debatable if we even need one? though I would say that if you want to save handwriting you should insist it become all print, but if you want to kill handwriting you should push cursive.
these are just some of the reasons cursive sucks. cursive proponents have no real arguments, but what passes for the most common ones can be refuted as follows:
1. the general benefits argument: its benefits are wholly unproven, no study has even proven benefits of cursive specifically, the closest is demonstrating that handwriting generally has some benefits, but no distinction between cursive and print; I have read dozens of studies about the issue, and none back up cursive when you read what they actually say. every study cursive proponents quote turns out to be either misquoted, taken out of context, overtly lied about, or cites a source that engages in this behavior. often they do not cite the anything at all. rarely do they articulate what benefits they think cursive has
2. the speed argument: this one is based on a flat out distortion of fact if not full blown lies, and it doesn’t pass the smell test of truth either; I have found even illegible cursive to be incredibly slow, much more so then print. you want me to believe that adding a bunch of pretentious, ornate, intricate, and gratuitous loops, curls, tails, flourishes and curlicues to letterforms speeds up writing? how could anyone have so little common sense so as to think that? this one is exceptionally stupid, but to be sure, I checked the research, and there are studies that show that cursive can, for some people, but not others, be faster only if legibility is not a concern at all, but those same studies find that legible cursive is significantly slower then legible print, which shouldn’t be a surprise given all those ornate loops and curls cursive letterforms have; cursive is much slower compared to print of equal legibility. also I happen to find illegible cursive to be significantly slower then legible print, or even illegible print. did I mention that cursive cannot be written “close enough” (or good enough that you can read the letterforms though they are imperfect), whereas print can, cursive has to be perfected before it can be used
3. the historical documents argument: this one is especially ridiculous when you think about it, and let me explain why:
A. it is possible to know how to read something without being able to write it yourself (for example I can read blackletter and Gaelic Script [which is not even typically used for writing English, though it can be used for that, outside of rare decorative inscriptions in Ireland, and a single house decoration my grandma owned; it never is, and never was; Irish Gaelic, by some accounts an endangered language is what is typically written in Gaelic script], but I will never be able to write either of them myself, in both cases my ability to read them is in fact better than I can read cursive; which I was years ago forced to waste excessive amounts of time learning to write, but no one ever bothered teaching us how to read); indeed many courses in dead languages like Latin focus on being able to understand what is already written in the language, not on being able to speak it or write it yourself
B. there are thousands of places you can find print versions of America’s founding documents, both hard copy and digital; some of the hard copies are from that era, those versions actually being what most people read, not the “originals”; and changing the font in which words are written does not change the meaning of them; if anyone asks I can show you some of those locations
C. the cursive versions of those documents are not in ‘modern’ (palmer style) cursive; but instead an older form known as “copperplate”, which is very different; also, the spelling is not the same as is typical today (for instance the constitution contains the words “chuse”, “Pensylvania”, “controul” and “defence” [that is how the document actually spells them]; among others); and they documents use the long s (an archaic form of a letter that cursive classes never mention even exists); add to that the fact that I have seen the originals of them for myself, and the writing is faded to the point of being barely legible; I could also add that the original version of the constitution capitalizes the first letters of common nouns, something that has vanished from English today, but should seem familiar if you have learned German as a foreign language like I have, but I think the point is clear even without that
D. reading the originals requires a trip to a specific room in Washington DC, which only a few people are able to do. and also, even if you can read cursive, you cannot read them in whole, as the displays they are on are permanently exposed to the first page only; so good luck with your impression of Nicholas Cage in the movie “National Treasure”; as that is the only way you will have the chance to read more than the 1st page of the originals; which you will be able to enjoy your new knowledge of them from prison, as stealing the original copies of the constitution or the declaration of independence is one of the most serious forms of theft from the US government possible, so expect to be on the FBI wanted list, for life, even if you somehow avoid jail; anyone dedicated enough to do all that will have certainly studied reading cursive enough to read it even if cursive is not taught in schools
E. even if this is a skill that is taught, it is so niche that it should be AN ELECTIVE ONLY, some will choose to take it, some will not; if there are still historians, archeologists, and linguistics scholars who can read Hieroglyphics, Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, and Cuneiform, we can be sure a few will take that class
in short, cursive is both not needed, and not enough to read those documents in the original; and should be consigned to an elective like Latin. there is a distinction between skills vital enough that everyone should have them, and those that a few specialists need (and can learn without forcing the rest of us to spend hours learning it)
4. the what if digital devices are unavailable/ fail argument: if that happens, we can use print handwriting, which is easier to read, easier to write, faster to write period in my opinion, and undeniably faster to write legibly, looks like what we see in books and on those digital devices; and which no one is seriously proposing getting rid of; many proponents of cursive seem to be conflating handwriting with cursive, when cursive is a single exceptionally difficult and pompous looking variety of handwriting; don’t confuse a single exceptionally ornate and outdated form of a concept with the whole of the concept. indeed if we just need handwriting and any handwriting will do, in the absence of a particular reason otherwise, it makes sense to use the easiest form of handwriting
5. the dyslexia argument: this one is simply false, I am mildly dyslexic myself, and cursive didn’t help me at all with spelling or writing, and in some ways made it worse. Cursive has more letters that look like each other then print does.
6. the signature argument: legally signatures do not have to be in cursive; they don’t even have to resemble your name. signatures can be printed, x marks, black letter, letters of the Russian alphabet, Chinese characters, a stick figure drawing of a cartoon character, a form of cursive other then palmer method (such as copperplate, Spenserian or Getty-Dubay) random squiggles, or something else; all that matters is that it is distinctive. most cursive signatures degenerate into squiggles anyway.
7. the letters from grandma argument: honestly, I find it unrealistic in several ways; for one I have never seen my grandparents write in cursive, ever. also, someone else can transliterate them. as mentioned previously, learning to read something does not absolutely require being able to write it yourself. also, I think grandma has a problem if she is sending people letters in a form of handwriting they cannot read, surely the burden should be on the person sending the letters to make them legible to the recipient. If they are addressed to someone else, then maybe its not our business to read them
8. the beauty argument is ridiculous for several reasons. For one, there is much better out there, if you want beautiful looking letters, try Bengali as a foreign language. The letters of Bengali (especially, but not limited to “kô” the first letter in their equivalent of alphabetical order) blow even the best looking written English out of the water. if you have seen what Bengali looks like, you can’t possibly tell me that ‘b’s that look like ‘l’s, ‘n’s that sometimes look like ‘m’s, ‘q’s that look like 2s or z’s that look like a cut open human heart (or at least that is the closest describable thing they look like to me), or similar forms are better looking than Bengali kô, and you don’t have to be able to read or speak Bengali to think those letters are good looking. but off that tangent. Two, most people’s cursive is truly ugly and awful, only a few people can write cursive in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Three, beauty is a subjective opinion, and mandates that apply to all should not be based on subjective opinions unique to some; I find the form of cursive taught in schools to be very ugly with the sole exception of the letter s. Four, there is pretty looking print as well, for instance try Gaelic Type, I find it much prettier and more legible then cursive. Five, aesthetic concerns are not a good reason to mandate that all people put a lot of hard work into something. It would be different if only people who voluntarily chose too put the work in though, but cursive as an elective would meet that criteria, mandatory cursive does not.
9. the “creativity” argument: this one is absurd; you want me to believe a highly regimented and standardized process that is extremely difficult improves creativity; next you will be trying to say that gravity pulls things up, or that Adolf Hitler was a pacifist.
if you have any that are not subsets of those, tell me so I can knock it down.
I will concede that cursive does have the “advantage” of looking more pompous.
on the other hand, the case against cursive included among other things, the freedom argument (that the default position is you are not required to, but can if you want to), but also the fact that we cannot teach everything to everyone, so the things we mandate everyone learn should be limited to things with clear benefits. additionally, there are hundred of more relevant things that time could be used for. also, for many people (including myself, but others to an even greater degree) cursive is awful, they just cannot write it, and even trying causes significant pain. to people who struggle with long handwriting anyway, cursive is pure torture. It is an open question whether I would rather be water boarded or write cursive, I would have to think hard. and I know of people who have worse experiences with cursive then I did! I would prioritize peoples freedom from serious physical pain over what nostalgic luddites who don’t know what century they live in think looks good, at least when it comes to what people are required to do, even if you think it looks nice, it is grossly selfish not to in that situation. I am not necessarily calling for an end to cursive, I am calling for an end to compulsory cursive.
there are things that are and should be desire dependent, those who want them should have them, but no other people should. to disagree with that is to accept the principle underlying totalitarianism. all the actual facts in the modern era place cursive in that category. Cursive should be TAUGHT AS AN ELECTIVE ONLY. it is no more essential then Latin, and in my subjective opinion, less interesting. I am very confident that a substantial minority would take the elective. the people who are specifically interested, and no one else, should learn cursive. LET CURSIVE SURVIVE AS AN ELECTIVE!!!!!