I remember when I was in third grade at Highland Oaks Elementary School, and my teacher handed out cursive workbooks. My classmates and I all looked curiously at scribbles which we failed to understand. A few months later, we started getting the hang of it, reading our teachers’ daily agenda written in cursive with ease. I found myself occasionally trying to write the entire alphabet strung together with delicate lines. 

Today, whenever I am writing formal cards or decorative signs, I love using cursive to enhance the appearance. Teaching cursive presents many advantages to students. Unfortunately, in modern society, the teaching of cursive is declining. 

When students are first introduced to cursive, they are around 7 to 8-years-old, which is still a time for fine motor skills to be developed. Different studies have shown that with learning cursive, various parts of the mind are activated, and learning cursive improves motor skills. 

According to We Are Teachers, “When students learn to write in cursive, they must coordinate fine motor skills with visual and tactile processing abilities.” 

Fine motor skills are important in daily tasks that involve small movements of hand and finger muscles—from eating to tying shoelaces. 

Cursive also helps children to remember and memorize new words.

Scholastic stated “Cursive encourages kids to visualize each letter as one united word.” 

Since cursive requires children to write in a certain order to link the words together, students who know cursive tend to be better at language processing. 

Some may argue that in the day and age of technological advancements, time spent learning cursive could be better put in teaching students to type more efficiently. However, we mustn’t forget that many assignments still require hand-written notes and signatures. 

“If you use a keyboard, you use the same movement for each letter,” said Audrey Van der Meer, a neuropsychology professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. “Writing by hand requires control of your fine motor skills and senses.”

Even though the use of cursive may be dropping, students should still be taught it as the benefits can be applied to much more than just handwriting. The halting of cursive writing will not only be detrimental to students but also serves as an act of erasing part of history.

Photo courtesy of PXHERE.COM