We must not allow cursive writing to become a lost art in America. Can you imagine someone finding old letters they were dying to read, in a box up in the attic, and being unable to read them? An untrained eye trying to read cursive might be almost like attempting to read a foreign language you never learned.

What would it be like if we lost the internet for a long period of time? There would be no typing on keyboards. Printing is slower than writing in cursive. You can find information to the contrary online, but I’m not buying it. Other articles confirm my theory that cursive is faster. There’s no way it wouldn’t be faster to leave your pen or pencil in motion for an entire word, rather than stopping the flow with each letter. I did a rather unscientific test on myself and calculated that cursive seems to be about 30% faster. If you use cursive, maybe you can do your own comparison test. The stopwatch on your phone will make it easy.

Sure, if you do a comparison test with a fourth grader who just learned cursive, they probably can’t write cursive faster than printing. If you want a better test, use a college student who has used cursive extensively. By the way, one article I read mentioned that, although some college students may type fast enough to get every word of the lecture, those who paraphrase in cursive retain the information better.

Another thing that we would lose if we lost the art of cursive is the expression of our personalities in our handwriting. Once you have done cursive for a while, you will establish a distinct style of your own, almost as identifiable as a fingerprint. The size and shape of your letters will differ from those of others. You will add a little squiggle here or leave one off there. You will develop your own favorite versions of the capital letters. Without the art of cursive, will signatures still be a way to authenticate the signing of a document?

An npr.org article called “What students lost since cursive writing was cut from the Common Core standards” states that the requirement for teaching cursive was removed from U.S. Common Core standards in 2010. Not long ago I wrote a note for what to order when my husband went to a fast food restaurant to get us some food. He handed the note to the worker taking orders, but the worker was unable to read my cursive note. A friend told me that her children that are now in their mid-40s attended school in the inner city and were taught cursive. On the other hand, some of her relatives in the same age range as those children, who attended school in a suburb, were not taught cursive. The npr.org article brought up the fact that there are many historic documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, that were written in cursive. Students would no longer be able to read the original documents for themselves. According to a 2022 article on the nea.com website, only 21 states required students to learn the art of cursive writing at that time.

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I found a very helpful book for learning to write in cursive. It’s called Daily Cursive Writing Practice. It would be useful for teachers, parents supplementing the school’s education, or parents homeschooling. Adults could even teach themselves. The book mentions another advantage of learning cursive. It strengthens fine motor skills.

In this book for teaching cursive there are some tips for teaching it in the front of the book.

Then there are lined pages for tracing and then practicing the upper and lower case letters of the cursive alphabet. After that comes practice of tracing and writing the names of the 50 states, words for numbers, colors, days of the week, and names of the months and seasons. Following that are some writing challenges, for which there are some blank lined pages toward the end of the book. Then there is a signature practice page and a page for a fun project of collecting signatures from others.

Just think—whoever learns cursive from this book could do one activity per day and in a couple of months or so learn the art of writing cursive. I believe it would be well worth the effort.