For Faust’s students, a major consequence of not being able to read cursive was they had to dramatically change how they responded to assignments to avoid reading certain manuscripts. One student couldn’t do an assignment on Virginia Woolf because it would have meant having to read her handwritten letters.
“It was an imposition of a limitation on them that they perhaps hadn't recognized,” said Faust. The students realized they were relying on others to translate important documents and that they'd lost the power to investigate certain parts of the past. “Do you make yourself dependent on somebody else's decisions, that could be influenced by politics or other agendas, for the transcriptions?” said Faust.
Wiley of UNC argued that handwriting in general is good for our brains — and that writing and reading are intrinsically connected in a way that reading and typing on a computer are not.
“The layout of the keyboard is arbitrary in the sense that, you know, when A is next to S, there's nothing similar about the shape or the sound or the names of those letters,” said Wiley. “If I type an A versus a Q, if you're looking at a keyboard, the motion is very, very similar. But if you're writing an A versus a Q, the motions are very, very different.”
Berninger of the University of Washington advocates for teaching multimodal writing. By studying kindergartners and first graders, she and a team of researchers at UW were able to show that handwriting plays an important role in reading.
They followed those same children through seventh grade. “And the important finding was starting in third and fourth grade, when children had cursive instruction,” said Berninger. “We found an advantage for cursive. The children spelled better when they could use cursive. They wrote more, they wrote faster. They wrote better in their compositions when they could use cursive than when they printed or when they used the keyboard.”
Berninger said that in cursive writing, each stroke is distinctly connected to the next. Children have to link individual letters into whole units, which mirrors the way reading comprehension turns a cluster of letters into a word with meaning.
She said that a lot of bad press around learning cursive is related to the way it’s taught. “They'd spread it out one letter a day and drill-and-skill, and that was not necessary,” said Berninger. Her research has shown that there are far more effective and less time-consuming ways to teach cursive.
Gutierrez of Popular Science has written extensively about the benefits of handwriting. She emphasizes that it's important to find the joy in handwriting, which is not something many students were taught.
“I feel like a lot of what's been said already [is] about the trauma of being taught cursive. It's very ingrained in people's brain,” Gutierrez said. “I feel like just making the practice of handwriting as pleasurable and joyful for you as possible is absolutely crucial.”
Educational benefits aside, finding joy in a beautiful handwritten note may be a good enough argument for continuing to write in cursive. Faust describes handwriting notes as an integral part of her former job as the president of Harvard. “There was a kind of intended magic about that, an embodiment of me on the page that I was sending off to [people],” she said.
