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Dear Editor:
For the past several months I’ve been in contact with Noblesville Schools Administrative Personnel, State Senators, our local State Representatives’ offices and Noblesville School Board Members exploring the idea of bringing cursive back into Indiana schools.
In 2011, Common Core standards were passed, which allowed Indiana schools to eliminate cursive being taught in the elementary schools. Many school systems then eliminated this skill. In my conversations, particularly with Indiana State Senator Jean Leising, who has championed the cause of restoring cursive back into Indiana schools since that time, there are several things that are happening that you could classify under the category of “unintended consequences.” Here are two conversations I’ve had lately:
- A post office employee has told me she had passport applications denied because the high school applicant couldn’t sign their name in cursive.
- An employer wrote a note to a student praising him for a job well done. The student had to reluctantly hand the note back, explaining he couldn’t read it because it was written in cursive.
Senator Leising explained to me that she’s had conversations with employers who require doing research of historic documents in the courthouses of Indiana. They have told her they would like to offer permanent jobs to interns who have worked for them, but when they can’t read cursive, they simply can’t hire them.
The result? We are putting our young people who have been educated in the public school system at a disadvantage in the job market. Every private or parochial school I’ve researched is teaching this skill, so these students have an advantage when they enter the workforce.
The most recent unintended consequence had its grand opening at Federal Hill Commons in Noblesville last Saturday. It’s an impressive display funded by Vance and Mary Jo Patterson of Morgantown, N.C., supported by the City of Noblesville and the Noblesville Parks Department. It is one of only three displays in the nation that is illuminated. It is something to see. The Patterson’s vision was to bring life-sized versions of the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and our Constitution to inspire us all. Our Congresswoman in Washington, Representative Susan Brooks, was the keynote speaker last Saturday. Our Mayor, John Ditslear, said the community can honor our history and teach future generations with the Charters of Freedom.
Unfortunately, the ability to read these documents has been eliminated for our young people who are now between the ages of 9 and 17 years old.
What can we do to change this?
Make it known to your child’s teachers that you want cursive brought back. If enough teachers hear your concerns, they can bring it to their meetings with administration.
Email or call (317-773-3171) Noblesville Schools Administration. Superintendent Dr. Beth Niedermeyer’s email address is beth_niedermeyer@nobl.k12.in.us. The elementary curriculum director is Dr. Jennifer Wheat Townsend (jen_townsend@nobl.k12.in.us).
Email or call your Noblesville School Board members. Its president is Carl Johnson, carl_johnson@nobl.k12.in.us.
Email or call your State Senator, Victoria Spartz (Senator.Spartz@iga.in.gov) and/or your State Representative, Chuck Goodrich, (h29@iga.in.gov). They have the power to bring cursive back into Indiana schools when Senator Jean Leising’s bill is again presented to the House and Senate.
We all want our young people to succeed. Let’s help them.
Patty MacInnis
Noblesville
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. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
More recently, the research has also documented that, on the average, cursive does NOT objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia.
This is what I’d expect from my own experience, by the way. As a handwriting teacher and remediator, I see numerous children, teens, and adults — dyslexic and otherwise — for whom cursive poses even more difficulties than print-writing.
(Contrary to myth, reversals in cursive are common — a frequent cursive reversal in my caseload, among dyslexics and others, is “J/f.”)
Interestingly enough, the first-ever published research study on dyslexia — back in 1896 — was a case history of a cursive writer. Writing in cursive, he misspelled his first name (“Percy”) as “Precy”: a classic dyslexic reversal, in cursive, by a writer trained in cursive only handwriting from Day One of school.
— According to comparative studies of handwriting speed and legibility in different forms of writing, the fastest, clearest handwriters avoid cursive — although they are not absolute print-writers either. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all: joining only the most easily joined letter-combinations, leaving the rest unjoined, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive still matters — but reading cursive is much easier and quicker to master than writing the same way too. Reading cursive, simply reading it, can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print.
We don’t require our children to learn to make their own pencils (or build their own printing presses) before we teach them how to read and write. Why require them to write cursive before we teach them how to read it? Why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, such as a form of handwriting that is actually typical of effective handwriters?
Teaching material for such practical handwriting abounds — especially in the UK and Europe, where such handwriting is taught at least as often as the accident-prone cursive which is venerated by too many North American educators. Some examples, in several cases with student work also shown: 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/curriculum.html )
Even in the USA and Canada, educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37% wrote in cursive; another 8% printed. The majority — 55% — wrote with some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.
(If you would like to take part in another, ongoing poll of handwriting forms — not hosted by a publisher, and not restricted to teachers — visit http://www.poll.fm/4zac4 for the One-Question Handwriting Survey, created by this author. As with the Zaner-Bloser teacher survey, so far the results show very few purely cursive handwriters — and even fewer purely printed writers. Most handwriting in the real world — 75% of the response totals, so far — consists of print-like letters with occasional joins.)
When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it?
Believe it or not, some of the adults who themselves write in an occasionally joined but otherwise print-like handwriting tell me that they are teachers who still insist that their students must write in cursive, and/or who still teach their students that all adults habitually and normally write in cursive and always will. (Given the facts on our handwriting today, this is a little like teaching kids that our current president is Richard Nixon.)
What, I wonder, are the educational and psychological effects of teaching, or trying to teach, something that the students can probably see for themselves is no longer a fact?
Cursive’s cheerleaders (with whom I’ve had some stormy debates) sometimes allege that cursive has benefits which justify absolutely anything said or done to promote that form of handwriting. The cheerleaders for cursive repeatedly state (sometimes in sworn testimony before school boards and state legislatures) that cursive cures dyslexia or prevents it, that it makes you pleasant and graceful and intelligent, that it adds brain cells, that it instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or that it confers numerous other blessings which are no more prevalent among cursive users than among the rest of the human race. Some claim research support — citing studies that invariably 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 as soon as others examined the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, and anyone checks it out, the source turns out to have been misquoted or incorrectly paraphrased by the person citing it,
or
/3/ the claimant correctly quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
For instance, here is info about how a cursive supporter in the state legislature of Indiana, who was caught publicly falsifying the important research on handwriting that is being done by university researchers in her State in order to make that research support cursive above the other styles of our handwriting:
https://www.hoosiertimes.com/herald_times_online/news/local/iu-researcher-legislator-s-editorial-basically-lying/article_2f71ebc7-61cb-5650-be94-e1915b60d0d6.html
The research had compared educational outcomes for keyboarding and printing (and had found advantages for printing). Since the study didn’t involve cursive, Leising took it on herself to drum up support for the cursive bill by publicly stating (in a newspaper piece) that the study had proven that cursive makes children into better readers.
Any cursive devotees’s eagerness to misrepresent research has substantial consequences, since the misrepresentations are commonly made, not just in the media , but also under oath: in testimony before school districts, state legislatures, and other bodies voting on educational measures.
In Indiana and other states, the proposals for cursive are, without exception so far, introduced by legislators or other spokespersons whose misrepresentations (in their own testimony) are later revealed — although investigative reporting of the questionable testimony does not always prevent the bill from passing into law, even when the discoveries include signs of undue influence on the legislators promoting the cursive bill. (Documentation on request: I am willing to be interviewed by anyone who is interested in bringing this serious issue inescapably before the public’s eyes and ears.)
Handwriting matters — does cursive? Research shows that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are available on request.) The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all: joining only the most easily joined letter-combinations, leaving the rest unjoined, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive matters — but is much easier and quicker to master than writing the same way too. Reading cursive, simply reading it, can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print.
Educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37% wrote in cursive; another 8% printed. The majority — 55% — wrote with some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.
When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it?
Cursive’s cheerleaders (with whom I’ve had some stormy debates) sometimes allege that cursive has benefits which justify absolutely anything said or done to promote that form of handwriting. The cheerleaders for cursive repeatedly state (sometimes in sworn testimony before school boards and state legislatures) that cursive cures dyslexia or prevents it, that it makes you pleasant and graceful and intelligent, that it adds brain cells, that it instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or that it confers numerous other blessings which are no more prevalent among cursive users than among the rest of the human race. Some claim research support — citing studies that invariably prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
When a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things becomes evident as soon as others examine the claim:
/1/ either the claim provides no source,
or
/2/ the source turns out to have been misquoted or incorrectly paraphrased by the person citing it,
or
/3/ the claimant correctly quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
Those who actually think about the research (as they should) owe it to themselves — and future generations — to learn from a researcher at the University of Calgary: Hetty Roessingh, who notes that the benefits of handwriting (in any form) are best provided in the “italic” handwriting systems — in other words, the systems where cursive does t depend on joining every letter because it begins with a stage of fluent printing and retains those print-like forms when joining is introduced in just the most practical places and NOT otherwise: see video and story at https://globalnews.ca/video/5847024/the-lost-art-of-handwriting-why-a-calgary-professor-believes-its-so-important and https://www.680news.com/2019/09/04/children-education-handwriting/
By now, you’re probably wondering: “What about cursive and signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive?” Brace yourself: in law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the 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 at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual — just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
Kate Gladstone
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
handwritingrepair@gmail.com
By now, you’re probably wondering: “What about cursive and signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive?” Brace yourself: in state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the 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 at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual — just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines 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
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Ongoing handwriting poll: http://poll.fm/4zac4
The research most often misrepresented by devotees of cursive (“Neural Correlates of Handwriting” by Dr. Karin Harman-James at Indiana University):
https://www.hw21summit.com/research-harman-james
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
The first-ever case-study of dyslexia, clearly documenting dyslexic reversals in a cursive-only writer — W. Pringle Morgan, “A Case of Congenital Word-Blindness,” BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL, Vol. 2, No. 1871 )Nov. 7), p. 1378: on-line at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2510936/pdf/brmedj08820-0014.pdf
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
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
handwritingrepair@gmail.com