Learning cursive is important; writing in cursive isn't
An argument in support of the reintroduction of cursive to the elementary school curriculum.
If you were to ask me what has made the biggest difference in working towards becoming a better writer, the answer I would give you is very simple: writing more. Education, exposure, and maturity have all been essential pieces of having more to talk about and developing more nuanced opinions. But if we are only talking about writing, the thing that has made the biggest difference has simply been doing it. The more time I have spent working on writing for Horse of a Different Colour, other Substacks, newspapers, my running journal, you name it, the more I have thought about sentence structure, vocabulary, and different ways to effective convey meaning and message on paper. When I speak to friends and peers about how they developed their writing skills they have all said the same thing: writing more.
I do virtually all of the writing for Horses of a Different Colour on a keyboard. But this is one of the only places where I do all of my writing, start to finish, digitally. Be it notes for work, reflecting on my running, or other writing experiments, I write by hand, in a notebook. Not only do I write by hand: I write in cursive.
I have written predominantly in cursive since I learned how to do so with the blue, soft-cover workbook that was handed out to everyone in my class in grade 3. We were told that it was a more efficient way of writing, but I’m fairly certain that my affinity for it had more to do with thinking that it looked “fancy.” What I did not know until recently was that I was among the last years of cursive instruction being a mandatory part of the elementary school curriculum. I graduated from elementary school in 2008, cursive was made optional in Ontario in 2006.
Beginning in September, cursive will be reintroduced to elementary school curriculums as part of a number of changes being made to language instruction including an increased focus on phonics and other evidence-based methods. That there are changes coming to the language curriculum is somewhat unsurprising. There has been ample reporting on the realization of many parents during Pandemic lockdowns that the newer approaches to teaching literacy were failing their children. While there appears to be little debate around most of the changes that are coming, the reintroduction of cursive has been surprisingly divisive.
The arguments in favour of cursive writing instruction go beyond the ability to properly draw one’s signature, and include things like development of literacy and fine motor skills. The arguments against cursive generally centre on it being an outmoded skill better reserved for art class in an increasingly digital age. No one is talking about increasing the speed with which you can get words out on the page (probably for the best).
Cursive was originally phased out of the curriculum for all of the reasons that people argue against reintroducing it now. With the rise of digital technology and access to computers, there was a perspective that an increased focus should be placed on skills like typing (which yes, is also an incredibly important skill to teach children) because handwriting would fall by the wayside. What the evidence shows, however, is that while this attitude may be correct as far as literally writing in cursive on the regular goes, it is an incredibly narrow perspective that misses the broader impacts of certain forms of early language instruction.
Studies have shown the importance of developing embodied cognition. This is essentially the process by which we are able to transfer cognitive skills to new circumstances and modalities, and by which we are able to engage in certain actions automatically. What has also been shown is that students who develop automatic reading and writing skills by the time they start grade 4, the point at which the pace and workload of school dramatically increases, the better they will do throughout the remainder of their education. This is because of the role of handwriting in the development of neural connections. Typing on a keyboard removes the mechanical process of learning letters because all keys feel the same when you press them. The result is that childrens’ brains do not form the types of connections necessary for optimum language development, something that will be difficult or impossible to correct at a later age.
But if it’s just writing the words by hand that matters, why is cursive specifically of value? The answer is not so that kids can read old documents, though it was sad to see the number of Reddit threads looking to translate cursive to into English I happened upon in the process of my research. This is where we get to the part of the story that shifts us away from an emphasis on writing in cursive as a form of communication and to the value of cursive language skills because of their tertiary effects.
The first is again about forming automatic written language skills. Adding cursive back into the curriculum means that another hour of the week or more is devoted to practicing writing. This means more time spent practicing understanding the sounds that letters make on their own and in combination, and more time spent reading and writing words. The more time children spend interacting with language, the faster and better they will develop those essential automatic skills. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Automatic language skills developed in early childhood have a measurable impact on future earnings.
The second is fine motor skill development. Fine motor skills are another one of the tools that we all rely on every day that need to be developed when we are fairly young. Cursive writing can be an incredibly important tool for helping to develop these skills. Children are required, when learning cursive, to practice a different way of forming letters that is clear and legible, providing an opportunity above and beyond that of regular handwriting to practice asserting control over a pen on paper. Furthermore, writing in cursive uses different muscles than printing meaning that its fine motor benefits cannot be duplicated simply by having children spend more time on printing.
Many of the changes being made this fall to the elementary language instruction curriculum involve a return to the methods that many, like myself, grew up with, and were phased out in favour of other programs. Like acknowledging that context oriented reading instruction, while it may be more in line with how we read as adults (if I don’t know a word now, I will often look to the words around it to see if I can figure out what it might mean before looking it up), is not a good way to teach children to read, doing away with cursive because we spend more time typing now did not make sense. The return to phonics and cursive writing instruction could almost be viewed as the acknowledgment that we tried something and it didn’t work, and so we are now going back to something that we know does.
If a child never writes in cursive again after they finish elementary school that’s fine, because it’s not actually what matters. What matters is that they got all of the benefits associated learning how to write in cursive that will significantly impact their academic and professional outcomes.
Great article Sadie!