Why Cursive Should Be Taught

501 Words2 Pages

Cursive, it’s a writing style that only so many people can read. When cursive was mandatory to learn, there were many students who could read that sentence above. But the number of people who can read cursive is starting to decline. 25-33 percent of students can’t read cursive, and that number is only going up. Why? Because cursive is no longer required to be taught. Since it is optional, many teachers decided to not include it in their lessons, the main reason being they want to teach students what they believe is more important, like keyboarding. Although students are starting to use typing more, cursive should become part of the common core curriculum standards because cursive increases creativity and the use of brain cells, improves reading …show more content…

According to Bateman, a representative from Idaho, "Modern research indicates that more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard(Smyth, 2013)". This concludes that more of your brain is at work when you write in cursive than when you use the keyboard, making your brain stronger and smarter. Secondly, cursive improves a student’s reading and writing skills. According to to a recent article by Julie Smyth, “Cursive advocates cite recent brain science that indicates the fluid motion employed when writing script enhances hand-eye coordination and develops fine motor skills, in turn promoting reading, writing and cognition skills(2013)”. This displays that when the brain is engaged in cursive, it increases their reading, penmanship, and processing skills, making them faster and better at all everything listed above. Finally, writing cursive allows students to read cursive. According to a 2013 article by Julie Smyth, “They further argue that scholars of the future will lose the ability to interpret valuable cultural resources--historical documents, ancestors' letters and journals, handwritten scholarship--if they can't read cursive(2013)”. This shows that if students don’t learn how to write cursive, they could struggle reading important records that were written in cursive, or even a friend who writes / in

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