For that reason, I’m just going to say that I enjoy writing in cursive for myself personally. Is it necessary? Probably not. Is it ‘better’? unlikely; my cursive is a hideous, indecipherable script, while my print is at least readable. I use it because it feels more “natural” and I can write faster with it. Simple as that.

I think handwriting/printing should be taught just like anything else… but cursive should not be enforced. Maybe learn the basics. Yes, it’s flowing and looks more elegant, but so is calligraphy. Learn the basics and focus on print. If signatures are so important, at least have kids learn to write their names in cursive.

Children can only learn so much in a given time period. If they were taught every skill just because some people found them useful and didn’t want them to die out them they would only have a very shallow understanding of most subjects destined to be forgotten the next year when they have to learn something else.

In my elementary school, we started learning LOGO programming in first grade; BASIC programming and keyboarding were formally introduced in fourth grade.

We also learned penmanship — which is good, because my penmanship was initially quite atrocious. Now I do Edwardian-style calligraphy for fun.

The long and short of it is that penmanship and computer skills are not, and should not be considered, mutually exclusive. There’s no reason one can’t learn both.

Besides — a good, old-fashioned Post-It note on somebody’s monitor is both more enduring than a text message and harder to ignore than an email

There have also been psychological studies that show that kids who write predominantly in cursive have a better handle on grammar and sentence structure, as they are thinking of the words as whole instead of going letter by letter.

Also, for those of you who say you write in a combination of print and cursive, graphologically speaking, it’s a very positive trait that shows the writer is able to adapt well to situations, is a fluid thinker, and can get a handle on the details as well as the big picture.

I’m a southpaw. For some reason, I have a fantastic handwriting. Same with my sister. I get comments all the time on my handwriting. I remember the schools just DRILLING it into our heads in the fourth grade! My fourth grade handwriting teacher was a mean old witch and I still can’t stand her. She used to single me out in front of the class because I was left-handed and “turned my paper the wrong way.” DUH!!!

Now my son is getting a lot of grief at school over his handwriting. Poor kid is in second grade, and yes, his print is messy, but he’s doing the best he can! Last night he literally burst into tears while we were doing his homework because he got so freaked out. He is completely obsessive about his letters, and wants them to be perfect. It worries me a lot.

Anyway, I digress. I’m just surprised this is such a controversial topic.

Fine. Here you go:

Shadmir, R. and Holcomb, H. (1997) Neural correlates of motor memory consolidation. Science Magazine, vol. 277.

Babcock, M.K. and Freyd, J.J. (1988) Perception of dynamic information in static handwritten forms. American Journal of Psychology, Spring, vol 101.

These two studies show that physically linking letters together gets students to think at the word-sentence level, rather than the individual letter level, thus increasing the speed with which thoughts can be put to paper.

Steve Graham at Vanderbilt University has done a number of studies on the positive effects of cursive handwriting on cognitive skills. In one study, 1st graders in Prince George’s County who could write 10 – 12 letters a minute were given 15 minutes of instruction in cursive 3 times a week. After 9 weeks, they doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. Graham also found improvements in their sentence construction skills.

Also see Carpenter, 2007; Tueling & Romero (Applied Submovement Analysis To Show The Learning Effects of Continuous Movement Patterns, 1997); Early, 1976; and Ochsner, 1990 (Physical Eloquence and the Biology of Writing) for evidence that cursive develops fine motor skills and written fluency at a faster rate than printing.

Not everybody will continue to use cursive in their adult life, but there’s still value in teaching it.

Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.

It has an added bonus here in Japan if I don’t want anyone else to decipher what I’m writing, for whatever reason. Since the norms for teaching English here are extremely inflexible, cursive has been absolutely baffling and unreadable for all of the natives I’ve come across, because they never encounter it.

Moreover, since the writing is so continuous, I find cursive reduces excessive self-censorship, which starts to creep up whenever I stop to think about what I’m writing, which tends to coincide with the times that my pen leaves the paper. When perfectionism creeps up and reduces my ability to put out any sort of product, cursive is the best solution, since the focused, continuous act of physically writing stops me from going back and second-guessing. It’s too easy to just mash the delete button if I’m using a computer and judge something to be inadequate, which is definitely hard for productivity–not to mention that typing is absolutely effortless. Much more difficult to crumple up and throw away that paper that I just spent pouring physical and mental energy onto. It gets the ideas out of my head and keeps them visible.

As far as writing itself goes, I personally hope that real writing is never entirely replaced by typing. Someone is bound to jump on me for this, but has anyone read “Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett? Moist’s speech about real letters versus the clacks? Think about it.

He said ‘Stop’, leaned forward, and turned the page on which I was writing nearly 90 degrees clockwise, so it was nearly horizontal. Then he said, ‘Try that’, and coached me, so I wrote my hand ‘underneath’ (actually to the left of) the writing.
End of problem.

I don’t understand why all the handwriting coaches that my classmates had never seemed to think of this; when I suggested it, other kids (and their parents) dismissed the idea, saying ‘it looked weird’, and that they should stick with just practicing a lot (which they hated, naturally; nobody enjoys being forced to repeat their failures ad nauseum). But rotating the page makes perfect sense, works pretty much from the word go, and requires next to no time to explain.

Works for printing, too.

So, I have to admit, I still think it is a good idea to learn to write in cursive. It only takes week or so to learn. Besides, with a teacher who pays attention and knows what he or she is doing, it provides an excellent opportunity to note coordination problems, since a complete inability to write legibly (in either print or cursive) might indicate an issue that is most successfully tackled early on.

And no, I don’t think second meaning “cursive” documents will become indecipherable, although it may require practice to get your eye in, rather like reading most historical hands does nowadays.

By the time I got to middle school, I was frustrated and angry about the emphasis on cursive. I used it only when teachers insisted on it (for final drafts of essays and the like). In high school, I faced the same situation, but a few of my teachers decided to save themselves some eye strain and eased the cursive rule.

When I was on college, and finally had regular computer and printer access, the weight of a decade of difficult penmanship was finally lifted from my shoulders. I never looked back.

I still do a lot of writing by hand, finding it easier to create first drafts with pen and paper while sitting outside than indoors, parked in front of a computer screen. There are a few cursive characters scattered in those pages, but they are few and far between. When I’m writing by hand, what matters to me is the words themselves. I was never able to adequately create the art known as cursive writing, so it never became important to me… except as something to be avoided.

Is it a valuable skill worth preserving? NO. We should be teaching children that what they have to say is far more important than the method by which those thoughts meet paper. There’s far too much emphasis on appearances over content in this world as it is. Spending time teaching students an artistic method of penmanship that could be spent putting truly valuable ideas and skills in their heads is as bad as my cursive handwriting… horrible.

Somethings in life are just worth learning, even cursive

So, I think just enough to get the basics down is fine enough. I mean, it can’t hurt, and it would help when reading certain fonts or older documents.

Someone upthread said that their writing in Cyrillic made their English writing better; for me, when I full integrated kana into my brain, it got that sort of round, slightly messy look that my English handwriting gets. I still try to balance my kanji, but they also show the characteristics of my English hand writing.

I love a lot of new technology, and am forever fiddling with, and tweaking my computers. But I’m glad I can write in cursive, too; it connects me to those who came before me, and may be read by those who are around a long way in the future. I may be more acutely aware of the vacuum that one is likely to experience, sooner or later, if one has no real connection to the past (it comes in those moments of silence, when the TV/radio/etc. is off, and you can actually hear your own thoughts), because I was born in a quite young country, but grew up in a couple of very old ones, and have travelled my entire life; I have no particular sense of a place or history that is ‘mine’.

Then again, I believe that ethics and being able to structure a cohesive argument should be taught at school too, so I know I’m in the minority

Citation needed. It is not intrinsically obvious that cursive encourages this any more than any other course focused on handwriting would.

As for the joke about not being able to forge notes from their parents, obviously if there parents are not using cursive either then there is no issue. Neither my wife or I use cursive.

You can’t really compare a math skill set to cursive writing, either. Some people here were doing that and it just isn’t comparable. Even if you have a calculator, you still need to know HOW to calculate. If someone says Add two plus two and you don’t know what an Add sign looks like, you’re screwed. If someone says what is 26% of 500, you are totally screwed. I know because I am terrible at math and all the calculators or computers in the world couldn’t help me through math problems in calculus.

What is this “need” to which you refer? My signature is not in cursive and I have executed many legal documents over two decades. Cursive is not necessary.

Obviously that doesn’t apply to everyone, but why not just teach kids to right legibly and be done with it?

Anyway, cursive and text messaging aren’t either/or. To use an analogy, it may be more convenient 95% of the time to drive a car, but it’s also nice to know how to walk for occasions when the car isn’t practical or available.

I firmly believe there’s still value in teaching cursive writing. It helps kids with spelling, discipline, high-order thinking, and organizational skills. It gets them to engage with individiual letters and the act of writing in a more adult way. It teaches kids that it’s possible to turn a ho-hum, pedestrian activity into something beautiful through daily practice and conscious craft.

Besides, without cursive, how are kids of the future going to forge excuse notes from their parents?

BUT I’d say it’s still necessary I was reading a few years back (4 or 5 or so). An article that said as a whole people are losing individual writing styles BECAUSE nobody (nobody as in younger generation, those who are students now), WRITES by hand. it’s all email/typing up things/texting etc.

Hell I have friends in college now that are only a couple years younger than me and they’ve all bought laptops to take notes on as oppose to just writing them down. (and when i was in college only 3 years ago NO ONE in my class used laptops to take down notes. maybe just my class but who knows).

I dunno, kind of eerie to think that one of the things that gives us individuality is going by the wayside because of technology.