The importance of cursive

by EraPhernalia Vintage

As cursive handwriting is increasingly being dropped from school curricula, Danielle Magnuson reports that writing by hand stimulates the brain in a way that keyboarding does not.


As Magunson points out, someone who never learns to write cursive will also never learn to read it:

"The neglected art has already created a generation of schoolchildren, from third graders on up through high schoolers, to whom cursive is a foreign alphabet."

She points out that it is "wildly practical" to avoid turning handwritten documents into "indecipherable codes.

Meanwhile, in some countries handwriting is still considered enormously important.  In Japan, for example, children take fully six years of calligraphy lessons as part of the public school curriculum using a traditional brush and ink.  Although this may have something to do with the writing system (it is virtually impossible to read Chinese characters written quickly by hand unless you also have experience of writing them and understand the forms they take on as they become increasingly cursive), it may also reflect the importance that writing by hand has in the culture: while email and texting are firmly established, most Japanese still consider that personal letters are ideally written by hand.