Simanaitis Says
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CURSIVE REDUX
TEN YEARS AGO, SIMANAITISSAYS was less than a year old when it asked pessimistically “Is Cursive Dead Yet?” Optimist that I am today, I’m happy to report, along with KTLA5, October 18, 2023, “Cursive Handwriting to be Taught in California Schools.” As the following tidbits suggest, it has been an interesting ten years for these loopy alternatives to the keyboard and printed alphabet.
Background. Back in 2013, SimanaitisSays noted, “The Common Core State Standards, a set of national recommendations for American schools, do not require cursive instruction. Some states, Indiana among them, have already taken it off the elementary curriculum.”
“Yet,” it continued, “on April 25, 2013, the North Carolina Senate passed a bill, 38-7, requiring cursive to be taught. The bill also requires memorization of multiplication tables. [Hurrah!] The North Carolina House of Representatives passed an identical bill unanimously. The two require only legislative reconciliation before being sent to the governor for his signature.”
Pros and cons continued since then: Without knowledge of cursive, our original Declaration of Independence and plenty of other more recent documents might as well have been written in Sanscrit. Even most personal signatures are cursive.
On the other hand, The New York Times as recently as December 13, 2022, shared an Op-Ed by Columbia professor John McWhorter, “What’s the Point of Teaching Cursive?”
Image by Delcan and Co. from The New York Times, December 13, 2022.
“By my lights,” McWhorter wrotes, “it is about as important for modern kids to learn cursive as it is for them to know their Roman numerals. The latter are kind of fun, and you have to know them to … well, for me they were for reading what the year was on ‘Looney Tunes’ opening credits, and I guess one might want to be able to know what year a building was constructed without having to ask someone. But just as those aren’t enough to impose learning Roman numerals on all schoolchildren, cursive’s time is up, now that all people will spend so much less time writing by hand.”
My View. Most people also “spend so much less time” adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing by hand—and not buttons. Yet, arithmetic remains a core subject of human knowledge.
And on the Other (Written) Hand. It’s a matter of cognitive development: As noted by The Optometry Center for Vision Therapy, “In today’s modern world, few people still write with pen and paper, let alone in cursive script. However, researchers believe that cursive writing is important to cognitive development and the brain’s sensorimotor region. There’s a substantial learning difference between handwriting cursive letters and typing or tracing those same letters.”
California and Others. My Cursive, May 17, 2019, updated August 31, 2023, offer “The 21 States That Require Cursive Writing [Updated!]” (In fact, updated to October 13, 2023, California makes it 22.)
Image from My Cursive updated for 2020. Move California (first through sixth grade) to the green.
KTLA describes, “The bill turned law was introduced by Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Fullerton, who was a former public elementary school teacher before entering politics, the Sacramento Bee reported.… The new law means that cursive handwriting instruction will now be required learning for California students, just like English, math and social sciences.”
New American Cursive. A new cursive has been proposed by New American Cursive Penmanship.
This proposed new cursive offers thoughtful insights beyond its minimization of loops and curls. For example, F, T, and Z get new cursive caps. (I confess, I had forgotten what their script versions were….)
An Aside. As noted in 2013, my handwriting is a mixture of cursive and print, with an early adoption of printed cap characters. Apparently I’m in good company: NAC says, “Our research indicates that 71% of adult cursive writers print their capital F and 51% print their capital T.”
Examples of my “cursive” compared with Wife Dottie’s classic (left-handed) version.
Helping Lefties. As opposed to Mrs. Grimbly’s apocryphal quelling of natural left handedness, New American Cursive practice book are spiraled at the top, not on the left edge. Also, the slant is a modest one, “easy for both left- and right-handers. A rigid vertical style is more difficult to write and tires the hand,” notes NAC.
NAC’s Goal: “Every aspect of the New American Cursive Penmanship Program, from the workbooks to the supplementary StartWrite/NAC software, is conscientiously designed to make an enjoyable and enriching experience for students and teachers while making all the connections between a valid handwriting style and a viable cursive.”
A worthy goal, I write, whether in mixed cursive/print or keystrokes. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023
Simanaitis Says 
This is a timely and important topic to discuss .
Way back when I had the heluvva time learning cursive and it’s still not my strong suit, I’m a lefty .
We now have foster boys and two teenagers are near to graduating high school in Los Angeles and they’ve never been taught cursive .
-Nate
Thanks, Nate, for your comments. (The pause before appearance is part of the WordPress process. No big deal.)
10.26.23 UPDATE
I went to a meeting with the staff of one of the boys who told me he couldn’t write his name in cursive, partway through he indignantly rebuked me “! I can too sign my name in cursive !” .
I was (& remain) well pleased ~ this boy is as sharp as a tack but is also a drug baby and has ADD or whatever they call too much energy these days .
We had five school people there and I think they actually listened to my concerns .
He’s getting D’s in only -one- subject, his other grades are all over the map but his abilities when he focuses are 85 ~ 90 % and to me that’s pretty damn good .
Oddly, the school allows him to carry his cell phone in class and he always has it on listening to music, he gets distracted and begins to sing along and dance around…….
This of course disrupts the entire class, why they don’t simply not allow cell phones is beyond their ability to explain to me .
He’s on track to graduate in 2024 and wants to go on to college .
-Nate
Another lefty here. Nate’s “right,” teaching cursive i s important and overdue, given declining literacy here in the States. Handwriting helps make language “up close and personal.”
Not only did i write, paint with left hand (despite throwing, batting, hammering, sawing w/ right), but held/hold pencil ‘twixt middle and forefinger, my sixth grade teacher constantly inveigling me to hold it “correctly,” this after i already furloughed to the left end of our row of desks so i wouldn’t elbow the kid on my left.
So “crabbing” my pencil, oft smudged what i wrote. Didn’t learn to type ’til after college. Later learned Peter Ustinov never learned to type, wrote entire screenplays in cursive.
In high school, a girlfriend’s mother, a painter/sculptor, sees me write something and exclaims, “Michael, you hold your pen like an artist!”
Vindicated at long last.
Thanks for this. Where else but SimanaitisSays do we daily encounter everything from detailed looks at novel auld racing and GT cars, movies, benign energy, the panoply of human development?