Dennis D. McDonald (ddmcd@ddmcd.com) consults from Alexandria Virginia. His services include writing & research, proposal development, and project management.

Why Cursive Is Still a Valuable Writing Tool

Why Cursive Is Still a Valuable Writing Tool

By Dennis D. McDonald

David Molloy's Do we need to teach children joined-up handwriting? is a good review of the issues swirling around many school systems' decisions to stop teaching cursive or, as Molloy calls it, "joined up handwriting."

As I pointed out in Why I Still Use Cursive I'm a big fan and user of cursive writing. As much as I value cursive, though, I think the real question should be whether -- and how -- to teach students to write.

By "write" I mean physically creating words, sentences, complete paragraphs, and even stories. Sure you can do this with a keyboard. But I believe that there is a more complete integration of thinking and writing when you lay out the words directly and physically on a page with a pen or pencil. After all, you can't just backspace over things written down on paper. You have to think a bit more about what you are saying.

I'm not suggesting you should not teach typing (even though typing itself may go away eventually as speech recognition software improves).

But I suspect there will continue to be more value to learning cursive than just being able to "write pretty."

Copyright (c) 2017 by Dennis D. McDonald.

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