Cursive Writing, Literacy, and Cognitive Growth
- fiction4
- Jul 13
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 13
Many artists feel mysterious power, readiness, or connection with the tools of their craft in hand. For me, it’s about touching the tip of a ballpoint pen to a sheet of unlined blank paper. I bring intention, and ideas take shape in words as pen glides on paper, opening a creative channel.
The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard?
One reason why writing by hand works for me is that my pen-to-paper connection feels more organic than poising my hands over a keyboard and raising my eyes to a screen. Another reason is that handwriting will document my errors. With one keystroke, I could delete what I think is a mistake – and then it’s gone forever. With a pen-on-paper strikethrough, the mistake sits legible and unforgiving if I decide that I was right the first time. (Sometimes I was.)
My relationship with handwriting is an artifact of a generation that didn’t have a keyboard on every desk. Literacy education meant learning cursive in third grade. My penmanship wasn’t the best, yet my hand was better able to match my speed of thinking. Third grade was also the year I started my first ambitious literary project. (Coincidence? A subject for another post.)
Emerging research in neuroscience and child development suggests that teaching children how to write by hand benefits their cognitive growth. The simultaneous engagement of visual and fine motor systems can wire young brains for symbol recognition, learning the look and sound of letters, and conceptual grasp of written language.
There are at least three areas of advantage in teaching cursive to elementary students: mind, body, and behavior.
Training the Brain
While we might equate the flowing motion of writing a continuous letter string to that act of drawing, the brain processes letters differently from images. In the early stage of learning cursive, the mind compares the personal variations of executing a task against the static models being copied by hand. This reinforces longer-lasting recognition in both reading and writing. The learning process simultaneously engages two separate parts of the brain: the temporary storage of working memory, easily overloaded as new data pours in, and the deep retention of long-term memory. Forming letters by hand is a good way to lock in the alphabetic knowledge critical for learning how to read.
Some findings have suggested that teaching cursive at a young age begins to address root causes of disabilities such as dyslexia (the reading difficulty in connecting spoken sounds with the symbols representing them) and dysgraphia (the writing difficulty in reproducing ideas as written words). Primary grades are the best time to address these issues; students have greater neuroplasticity and may feel less singled out while their peers are also learning the same skill set.
Kinetic Learning
Writing by hand engages the kinetic element of learning. You’re doing more than dragging a pen or pencil across a page. Your brain is recalling and selecting the words you want to use and the individual letters that comprise them. The fingers control the subtle differences in angle and pressure required for each shape, combining with the control of maintaining the hand’s lateral movement. Cursive reinforces children’s fine motor skills in a unique connection with learning how to spell words and express ideas in written language. As the body associates this set of movements with the embedded information, the learning engages at a deeper level, improving letter recognition, spelling, and other writing and reading outcomes.
Sure, young kids’ handwriting can be messy, but it helps to see good penmanship as the icing on the cake. Once the knowledge is in place, learning the style becomes less disruptive. I have a clear memory of modifying for style long after learning to write. I was never satisfied with how my capital Q turned out. I was finally done with laboring over that thing resembling an ornate numeral 2, a struggle that slowed me down, so I simply made an oval, lifted my pen, and started a tail flowing out of the oval and into the next letter.
You Are Not a Machine
With our culture always driving us to accomplish more with greater efficiency, it’s easy to lose our thread as thoughtful, imperfect animals governed by biorhythms. Maybe your hands are like lightning on a keyboard or your thumbs are a high-speed blur on your phone. Useful skills, both. Handwriting seems horse-and-buggy quaint by comparison. However, composing ideas or taking notes by hand can serve as a reminder to slow down, let our minds perceive and process language and ideas at their natural rhythm, and feel a deeper ownership of the material than we’d ever get as words-per-minute sprinters.
Handwriting is portable and practical. Of course you can bring a phone or tablet pretty much anywhere, but pen and paper don’t rely on the technology of a fully charged device with functioning software. If the power goes out or if you enter a world of candles and campfires, your spiral notebook works just fine.
Yet it’s important to transcend the “one is better than the other” argument around handwriting versus keyboarding. Putting your thoughts and observations into words is as multimodal as you want it to be. Switching between these media can keep your thinking fluid and your fingers nimble.
Rediscovering a Lost Art
During the 21st-century rise of standardized testing and the Common Core framework, cursive instruction was phased out of many elementary curricula, resulting in a generation of students who went directly from the alphabet to the keyboard without learning handwriting. Reversing course may not be easy, despite the compelling evidence noted above. Yes, more U.S. states are mandating the return of cursive education, which is great for literacy education, but it may be another matter for teachers, who already have a full plate with everything else currently expected of them. Just about any teacher will agree that a crucial skill like cursive is worth learning. Anecdotes suggest that students whose literacy started with keyboarding think of handwriting as a cool art form. As long as we don’t make them feel inferior about less-than-perfect penmanship, maybe we can bring this art form back into the mainstream.
Dive Deeper
I created this post to capture the flavor of an intriguing idea rather than present a comprehensive study. If you’d like to explore the subject further, consider starting with the articles I’ve linked below, some of which include links of their own that will take you deeper into the research.
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