A lot of people, lately, have been making a lot of noise about the death of cursive handwriting. They don’t want cursive to die. Handwriting matters … But does cursive matter?
Research shows that the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive. They join only some letters, not all of them: making the easiest joins, skipping the rest, and using print-like shapes for those letters whose cursive and printed shapes disagree. (Citation: Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HANDWRITING STYLE AND SPEED AND LEGIBILITY.)
Reading cursive still matters — this takes just 30 to 60 minutes to learn, and can be taught to a five- or six-year-old if the child knows how to read. The value of reading cursive is therefore no justification for writing it.
What about signatures? Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, then verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
The individuality of print-style (or other non-cursive style) writings is further shown by this: six months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the writing on an unsigned assignment) which of her 25 or 30 students wrote it.
There’s also this to consider: whatever your elementary school teacher may have been told by her elementary school teacher, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over signatures written in any other way. (On this, I could quote legal sources — and lawyers — but that would take more room than a guest column permits. So don’t take my word for this: talk to any attorney.)
In short, there is neither common sense, nor fact, nor legal necessity, behind the idolatry of cursive. Remember that research about the fastest, most legible handwriters? Most people who write that way were never taught to do it. Like the rest of us, they’d probably been taught otherwise. They had to stumble on those useful habits themselves, by consciously or unconsciously discarding what didn’t work in the printing or cursive styles they’d been taught, and keeping the best components of what was left — which meant breaking some of the rules they had been taught. But why leave it to chance and breaking the rules? There are books and (in the texting age) software designed to teach those better habits from the get-go and save handwriting for the twenty-first century. Here is one … and here is another.
(To learn more: visit http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com or e-mail me at handwritingrepair@gmail.com.)
Kate Gladstone — CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
Director, the World Handwriting Contest
Co-Designer, BETTER LETTERS handwriting trainer app for iPhone/iPad
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Kate, I agree that writing legibly is more important than writing in cursive. When I returned from Israel at the age of ten to the United States, after spending third and fourth grade writing only in Hebrew, I found that everyone in my class was writing in cursive, something I had never been taught and was not good at. My father suggested I write my letters separately without connecting them, but mimicking the cursive style, and in those classes where I could get away with doing that my writing was much more legible.
Good info — may I quote you on the “Handwriting Rebels” page of my web-site?
Sure, feel free to quote me!
Aya, my web-master plans to add your comment to my site’s “Handwriting Rebels” page this week.
When I write a letter in a blue moon, or if I write in my diary, I use cursive. However, when I am writing a song out for kids on large paper, as I have done in the past, I use printing with a chisel tip marker. I have extremely neat printing that really amazes people because it looks like a computer print out, and I really enjoy creating beautiful letters. Honestly, these days I can live without hand writing for days on end since I use a computer to type most thing.
Sweetbearies — I would like to see your chisel-tip handwriting … Do you have a picture of it, anywhere on the Internet, that I could lnk to? I am considering selecting some handwriting samples for future posts. Meanwhile, I wonder if the following samples, from other chisel-tip writers, might interest you and other readers …
Unjoined chisel-pen Italic handwriting by a colleague, James Pickering
A sample, written by Inga Dubay as I recall, of three variations of the Italic handwriting styles — one fthe samples uses a chisel-tip penned a few joins
I will have to take a picture of my writing one of these days. When I do, I will post the link here.