Cursive Writing Persuasive Essay

Cursive writing is a form of penmanship that flows by joining letters together with loops so that the writing motion is continuous and therefore more efficient because the pen does not have to lift off the page as often. Although cursive has been the primary method of writing for centuries, it has been slowly disappearing over the last decade in our primary schools. According to the US Today, 41 states have removed cursive writing instruction from their mandatory curriculum (qtd. Tarshis 6). There is significant controversy currently within the educator community on whether or not to keep cursive alive by making it mandatory curriculum in primary education. The debate centers on the time required to learn cursive, which could be dedicated

to math or science, versus the critical brain development benefits and fine motor skills that cursive writing provides. I support making cursive writing mandatory because I am persuaded that the benefits of learning and using cursive outweigh the costs.
Several years into the removal of cursive writing from the curriculum, psychologists and teachers are beginning to see the negative impacts to the overall learning experience and are persuading an increasing number of state legislatures to make cursive writing mandatory again. Many educators believe that learning and mastering this type of writing is as meaningful as learning how to ride a bike (Tarshis 11).
In a recent study that followed children from grades two through five, Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at the University of Washington, demonstrated that printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns, and each results in a distinct result. The study found that, when the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but also expressed more creative ideas for composition. Moreover, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory and an increased overall activation in the reading and writing brain networks (Konnikova 15). Dr. Berninger goes so far as to suggest that cursive writing may train the ability of self-control in a way that other modes of writing do not. Some researchers argue that it may even be a path to treating dyslexia and dysgraphia, which is a condition where the ability to write is impaired and is usually caused by a brain injury, and aids in preventing the reversal and inversion of letters (18). Also, an education professor at Florida International University found that children with neater handwriting developed better reading and math skills than their peers with sloppy writing (Shapiro and Voisin 22). The positive effects of cursive writing instruction continue, as the children get older. According to a 2006 report by the College Boards, SAT essays written in cursive received slightly higher scores than those written in block print (23)
The dissenters to mandatory cursive writing instruction argue that schools are under enormous pressure to develop students’ math and reading skills that they need to succeed on tests and in college and that cursive writing is simply not a critical 21st century skill.

Their argument is that, when society adds new skills and new knowledge to the list of things public schools need to teach, some other items have to come off the list. Otherwise, the curriculum becomes a mile wide and an inch deep, and cursive should be one skill that can be painlessly dropped to make way for new ones (“Cursive! Foiled Again?” 5). Steve Graham, an education professor at Arizona State University and one of the top U.S. experts on handwriting instruction, claims that today’s teachers value typing more than handwriting and that, by the 12th grade, half of all papers are composed on computers (Shapiro and Voisin 12-14). Graham views cursive instruction as teaching a second form of writing, for the sake of tradition, when only one form of writing will suffice (16). Many of today's young adults, even though they were taught cursive, have abandoned it in favor of printing because print is clearer and easier to read than script, and, for many, it is easier to write and just about as fast (“Cursive! Foiled Again?”

3).
The arguments against mandatory cursive instruction are compelling, but as someone who has suffered from brain development issues, I respectfully disagree. What? Scientists are just now learning the critical importance of developing fine motor skills at an early age and how those skills affect the overall brain function, particularly in the right side of the brain where we gain our creativity and critical thinking. Suddenly deciding that cursive writing is an optional skill and is no more important than block lettering after centuries of teaching that way and in the face of compelling scientific data that it has an important role in brain development and the overall learning capacity is a dangerous course. There is also tremendous empirical evidence in cultures that do not use cursive. For example, when looking at Asian cultures and the emphasis placed on the fine motor skills to create the characters and their higher learning achievement compared to the United States, connecting the fine motor skills and the art of writing precision to overall brain development is not a stretch. Before we abandon cursive writing all together as a mandatory part of the curriculum in the United States, we should better understand its role in brain development and make sure that we are not creating a worse problem in overall learning capacity than we would have by simply not teaching other subjects, which can be learned at a later stage.
In conclusion, the value of cursive writing goes far beyond the historical connection and being able to write more efficiently. The fine motor skills required for proper cursive writing have a distinct role in brain development and brain function that expand creativity in writing that may not be otherwise developed in other forms of written communication. We cannot simply dismiss this data and declare obsolete what has been a core part of our children’s development in our society without understanding all of the benefits that may not be otherwise obtainable.