This article published this week in the Christian Science Monitor:
Cursive letters offer more than aesthetic, study says
Cursive letters’ disappearance from US schools could be shortsighted; a University of Montreal study shows that learning cursive improves syntax and spelling.
By James Norton, Contributing blogger / September 16, 2013
The science of graphology has for centuries maintained that handwriting is a window into the soul: by scrupulous observation, an expert graphologist could, in theory, divine personal qualities, truthfulness, and even the moral character of the writer emanating from the handwriting that they were studying.
And while handwriting analysis might be overambitious about what it reads into the written word, it plays on an essential truth: the way we write relates to the way we think and express ourselves. As cursive handwriting is drummed out of schools from coast to coast, there has been push back from parents and educators – initially on an emotional basis, but increasingly with some more rigorous backing.
A study (published in 2012, but hitting the newswires this month) by Professor Isabelle Montésinos-Gelet at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Education looked into the writing habits of 718 Québec students and teachers in 54 second grade classrooms. Students were learning cursive, or learning to print letters, or both – the study suggests that students just learning cursive reaped benefits when it came to spelling and syntax.
The development of automatic motor movements, the study suggested, was key – when you can write in a smooth, no-thought-required manner, you can concentrate on expressing yourself, not on grinding out each individual word or letter. Cursive in particular forced students to develop a stroke order that resulted in no backwards letters, and it also pushed students into laying down proper word spacing.
Interestingly, the study didn’t examine what might happen to students who weren’t taught any handwriting whatsoever, but were instead simply drilled on expressing thoughts through keyboards (or voice recognition software) alone. That may sound like a dark future, but as more and more of human communication moves onto tablets and phones, it’s entirely possible that handwriting will one day be as generally relevant as donkey taming or archery.
As a still-active participant in the potentially dying art of writing letters out by hand, I think its possible death is a bit of a shame. A hand-written thank you note or invitation, for example, still trumps even the most animated of .gif-based communiques. And on those rare occasions when I receive written communication from someone with beautiful handwriting, I have to admit to feeling a little emotional about it – it’s an almost magical thing these days, only slightly less rare than a unicorn.
Like many journalists and most doctors, my own handwriting is what used to be called “chicken-scratch.” That said, the dozens of little hand-written to-do list notes I write for myself each day and fling about my home office, wallet, and car, are actually key to staying focused and getting work done. I could of course keep the same list on my smartphone or desktop computer, but having the physical artifact makes a big difference to actually being motivated by the list. And when it come time for my son to write thank-you notes for presents, he’ll be doing it with pen and paper, regardless of where the school system has gone with writing instruction.
The scariest thing about abandoning handwriting (print, or cursive) is the idea that by writing things out by hand, we may actually be usefully training our brain in a way that the mere interaction with computers doesn’t … and that training, much in the same way that talking changes the way we think, may help us be the people that we are.
On that front, handwriting conservatives like myself can breathe a sigh of relief that, at the very least, people are looking into the issue and finding that jettisoning cursive is not a small decision – how we write may have a real impact on who we are.
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The research in Canada interests me because I am a dyslexic dysgraphic (age 50) who self-remediated for handwriting (at age 24) and became a handwriting instructor.
It was particularly interesting to read the statement of Dr. Montésinos-Gelet, asserting that cursive handwriting prevents such dyslexia-related errors as reversals. I am trying to reconcile that assertion with the fact that cursive did not diminish the number and seriousness of my own reversals.
Further, reversals are documented to occur in dyslexics who have been taught only cursive handwriting.
(A well-known example is in the first published case study of dyslexia: “A case of Congenital Word-Blindness” by W. Pringle Morgan [source on request]. When this case was researchedand published, in 1896, all handwriting instruction was cursive and had long been so, yet the errors he documents his patient as making include at least two reversals: “Precy” for “Percy” — the patient’s own name — and “sturng” for “string.”)
Today, the most frequent cursive reversals in dyslexia include replacing cursive “J” with cursive “f” and vice versa, because these letters in cursive are near-exact mirror-images of each other. (I very much wish I could have told my parents and teachers that cursive guarantees “no backwards letters” and “proper word spacing” as one of the researchers is stating to the media — I would have loved to see the looks on their faces when they heard this while looking at some of the backwards cursive letters and badly spaced words that I had just filled a page with! Would the teachers have raised my grades, if an eminent scientist had been there to tell them that the writing couldn’t be bad — that the letters couldn’t be backward because they were in cursive?)
Because of my own experiences, and to better help my students, after learning about the Canadian research I found and studied the original paper that was behind the news report. Seeing the original paper compels me to question how correctly and adequately many media are reporting the scientific news — because, as I turned from the newspaper/magazine summaries and read the research itself, I saw that its findings are not entirely in favor of cursive — not ever mostly in favor.
• The students who were taught cursive only “displayed the weakest scores” in graphomotor skills (handwriting speed and handwriting quality) — page 117 of the study
• On two measures of composition skill (length of content and quality of content), the cursive-only group “displays the weakest scores” — page 118.
• Further, the study calls attention to an important factor which was entirely omitted from the newspaper write-up. Specifically, the original research states that the difference in handwriting instruction was not even the only difference in the instruction given the various groups of children. On page 114 of the research, and again on page 120), we learn that the teachers who used only cursive were additionally the only teachers using a particular teaching strategy — they were the only teachers who were “giving explicit teaching with verbal instructions” (page 114) and they were the only teachers “to integrate verbal information in handwriting teaching” (page 120). The researchers themselves, on page 120, acknowledge that this extra difference in how the teaching was done (over and above the difference in handwriting) may have had an impact on the cursive-only group’s higher scores in a couple of areas — and they acknowledge that that not researched this side of the question.
In other words: rather than a rosy portrait of overall advantages for cursive, the reality shows a very mixed picture of advantages and disadvantages (but mostly disadvantages) for cursive which the newsis not presenting:
• the cursive-only group writes the most slowly,
• the cursive-only group produces the worst quality of handwriting,
• the cursive-only group produces the smallest amount of writing,
• the cursive-only group produces the lowest quality of content,
• only in two areas (syntax and spelling) does the cursive-only group get a higher score — and this group was also being taught in a different way, over and above any difference in the form of handwriting. (In other words, we do not know how the other two groups would have performed if the comparison had been done fairly: if either all three groups, or none of the groups, had been given “explicit teaching with verbal instructions.”)
Therefore, the actual results (as opposed to their glittering representation in many a media write-up) reveal a very mixed pattern of significant advantages and significant disadvantages for cursive versus manuscript.
In four out of six areas, the cursive group did worse. I wish I knew why this is represented as a win for cursive.
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com