I didn’t see this one coming, but I am all for it! How can students sign checks and important documents if they don’t know how to do it when they are “college and career ready”?
I didn’t see this one coming, but I am all for it! How can students sign checks and important documents if they don’t know how to do it when they are “college and career ready”?
The Season Of Myths 
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, it has also been documented that 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.”)
— 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. (There’s even an iPad app teaching kids and others to read cursive, whether or not they write it or ever will write it. The app — “Read Cursive” — is a free download. Those who are rightly concerned with the vanishing skill of cursive reading may wish to visit appstore.com/readcursive for more information.)
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?
Just as each and every child deserves to be able to read all kinds of everyday handwriting (including cursive), each and every one of our children — dyslexic or not — deserves to learn the most effective and powerful strategies for high-speed high-legibility handwriting performance.
Teaching material for 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/.
Cursive devotees’ eagerness to misrepresent research has substantial consequences, as the misrepresentations are commonly made — under oath — in testimony before school districts, state legislatures, and other bodies voting on educational measures. 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.)
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:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
handwritingrepair@gmail.com
LikeLiked by 1 person
Kate, thanks for the longest comment I’ve ever received this blog! 🙂 I will actually make sure the sponsor of this bill gets to see this. Thanks again!
LikeLiked by 1 person
You know who pushed cursive??? Tennell Brewington, former thief, I mean, former principal of Family Foundations Academy.
The mere fact that SHE pushed cursive is enough to make me not give a sh#t about cursive for the rest of my life.
With all of the serious issues in education today, do these lawmakers have nothing better to do than to make up laws about bullsh#t? This is ridiculous. Christ on a craker!
Freakin ridiculous!!!
LikeLike
Yes, Josiah — the following link includes material with some good info about the tight connection between cursive and Tennell Brewington (who, despite her loudly claimed devotion to etiquette, good appearance, and cursive penmanship, left Family Foundatiins Academy — against her own volition — after some DEEP indiscretions, financial in nature, on her part and the part of certain of her good friends). That’s as polite as I can make it …
Note that I’m willing to speak to/workshop with any individual or group who needs me to help them work with handwriting issues and/or with the inadvisability of a cursive mandate.
LikeLike
Here’s that link I promised about the tie between cursive advocacy and the questionable Tennell Brewington (who is known as much for getting fired after her financially shadow-ridden principalship of Family Foundations Academy as for her classes in etiquette, and in cursive) — http://www.bing.com/search?q=tennell+brewington+cursive&form=APIPA1
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you Kate….My friends call me Joe.
I just cant see why law makers are making cursive writing a priority with all of the other hot issues at hand, why focus on cursive.
In reference to your link, I wonder what good ole Obama thinks about his girl Tennell Brewington now? Maybe he is the one who helped her and FFA reach that “agreement” that Kevin spoke about in his blog from yesterday.
I want to attend the FFA Board Meeting next week to hear THAT explantation, but I will be out of town visiting my cousin. The website said it was the 17th, but it was changed at somepoint within the past week.
LikeLike
I think the reason they focus on cursive is that it’s easier to claim that cursive makes its users intelligent, virtuous, and important than it is to actually _do_ anything intelligent, virtuous, or important.
They wrap themselves in cursive for the same reasons that a long-forgotten showman (Georgie Jessel) would wrap I himself inthe American flag and do a little dance across the stage whenever he’d just been booed over a poor showing in the skit or routine that he had just completed. Georgie Jessel knew his audience wouldn’t dare to keep on booing, once he’d wrapped himself in the flag … politicians who fail in the public’so scrutiny, likewise, may seek cheap and easy esteem by wrapping themselves in the faded banner ofa crusade for cursive.
LikeLike
It is only fair to Dr. Brewington to presume that, whatever her flaws, she always made certain that any improper use she made of others’ money was phrased in the politest of terms from beginning to end, and that she signed every document connected therewith in the most exquisitely painstaking cursive Imaginable. Perhaps such tasks were easier, for her and for her comrades, than mere abstention from _financial_ impropriety.
LikeLike
Too funny
After being dooped by Tennell Brewington, she no longer gets the title Dr. from me or my family. You are far too kind.
LikeLike
Joe, there is only one reason that I leave titles such as “Doctor” and “President” in front of the names of people who have forfeited an intellectual and/or moral right to titles of honor. The reason is this: By leaving such titles appended to the names of the people in question, I may lead other people.to question the juxtaposition of a worthy title to a name whose bearer has stripped it of worth. I want people to read the title next to the name, and thereby come to wonder what kind of society we have, in which one is still considered respectable after a long history of actions which forfeit respect.
LikeLike
Take care in handwriting decisions! Legislators are not educators, so they should be especially careful in this area. Research that alludes to the benefits of cursive simply does not exist at this date. Research has ONLY proved the cognitive value of writing by hand.
“Cursive” is known to many as the method of letter formation that dates to the latter part of the 19th century and joins every letter in every word. Why teach it? More and more and more people don’t use it, can’t read it.
,
Just some of the misguided, misquoted statements I often read:
1) It strengthens cognition. NO! Any writing by hand will do that.
2) It is faster. NO! That’s never been proved.
3) We need to read the Constitution and Granny’s letters. NO PROBLEM! It takes less than an hour to learn to read the conventional cursive alphabet.
4) It benefits fine motor skill. Then why do I see so many media illustrations of children writing their cursive lesson with death grips on pencils? No one is teaching the relaxed pen hold that is essential to fluent writing!
5) We need signatures. NO! Every hand makes an individual mark.
A variety of cursives have been used ever since the Romans gave us our western alphabet more than 2000 years ago. There must be a better way, a better cursive, one that would be easier to read and faster to write.
Italic cursive is becoming a better recognized option. I have taught it to young children for many years. It’s easy to learn, easy to read.
As first stated, handwriting in elementary grades strengthens cognition. So children do need it. They move their hands and fingers to form letters. The action goes into their motor memory to be recalled for reading.
Advocates of conventional cursive may truly believe the unproven claims that it is superior. Frequently, the media backs up this belief by misinterpreting researchers. Yes, a recent New York Times article was misinterpreted.
For the sake of better education for our children, serious, thoughtful attention is needed.
LikeLike