The return of cursive writing could help students

Dec. 15, 2021 | G. Michael Dobbs
news@thereminder.com

I’m not sure just when cursive handwriting was abandoned by public schools, but lately more and more school committees are considering either re-introducing it or placing greater time on it.

I realize that in the digital era in which how information is transmitted and how language is being transformed, the idea of communicating with pen and paper is considered obsolete at worse – and quaint at best – by some. What’s next? Bringing back rotary phones and VCRs?

Does cursive have a place when people spend so much of their time at a keyboard?

Cursive was the means of personal communication for centuries. I’m always amazed to see old letters, for instance, in which the penmanship was flawless.

No wonder, as people were practicing it all their lives and needed clear handwriting to convey necessary information.

Now admittedly I was not a great cursive writer. While I wasn’t some great student, I did have some subjects in which I showed a decent level of proficiency. Unfortunately, cursive handwriting was not one of them.

For those of you younger than me, you escaped the often-numbing exercises that came with cursive handwriting in elementary school. Fellow geezers do you remember the lined paper, the number two pencil and the instructions on the chalkboard how the letters should look?
The teacher would write on the chalkboard for us to follow. I realize I might have to define “chalkboard” for some readers.

In my case there was a disconnect between the way letters looked as printed and how they looked as cursive. I never received anything but passing grades at best and my dad would make comparisons between my writing and well, I can’t put in print what the other half of the comparison was.

With my trusty number two pencil in hand, I did my best to master cursive. I was so miserable at it that as soon as I could, I abandoned it when I went to college. I have no ill will against the practice. It’s a skill in which I was never able to excel. Today, I only use it to sign my name.

Now there has been research done to show that cursive is actually something that can bolster other skills in people.

Psychology Today ran a piece earlier this year about it and noted, “New research from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) suggests that handwriting practice refines fine-tuned motor skills and creates a perceptual-motor experience that appears to help adults learn generalized literacy-related skills ‘surprisingly faster and significantly better” than if they tried to learn the same material by typing on a keyboard or watching videos.”

“The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Literacy Learning” by Robert W. Wiley and Brenda Rapp. In the abstract the authors wrote, “Our results clearly show that handwriting compared with nonmotor practice produces faster learning and greater generalization to untrained tasks than previously reported. Furthermore, only handwriting practice leads to learning of both motor and amodal symbolic letter representations.”

As a person who enjoys aspects of technology that have largely been set aside, such as fountain pens and pocket watches, this renewed discussion about cursive writing certainly has me thinking. Perhaps if I had continued it as a kid, it would have helped me in other ways.

The trouble today is how cursive would be worked into a curriculum. As most of you with children in school realize a large part of the effort made by teachers is to cover topics that would be on MCAS. That is not to say other aspects of education are ignored, but there is certainly a limit to the hours in a day and the number of items that can be in a learning plan.

Still considering the research, perhaps this is a time for cursive to return. Maybe I’ll take a refresher course. I still use number two pencils.

Is it true or not?

I hear lots of rumors and I love them as they hold the potential of an interesting story. If false at least they can be entertaining.

I’ve been working to confirm or deny one rumor that, if true, would greatly affect the downtown of one of our prominent cities. The fact I cannot get anyone involved in the rumor to speak with me sort of makes me lean toward the idea that at least some elements are correct.

When I know something for sure, I’ll share it.

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