Writing In Cursive Is Not a Useless Skill

Do these studies show how strong the link is from cursive writing to increased intelligence, rather than the other way around? That doesn't make much of a difference if you are evaluating other people based on it but it might affect your choice to focus on it.

I find myself using handwriting for note in any kind of meeting or interaction. It's something about the ease (of certain things) and the feedback that guides you unconsciously. Part of the value might be the need to focus on writing well. Eventually this becomes instinctive so we don't need to think about it but maybe that part of it triggers a focus on other kinds of quality too.

On cursive, specifically, the results are inconclusive. The definite benefit seems to be in in writing longhand. I advocate for cursive given the efficiency of it over block print, and actually tend to agree with some of the other folks in the field who have studied it that it is so simple these days that it should probably be the only form of writing taught from kindergarten given the speed advantages. If we are going to teach typing, teaching print longhand makes no sense. It's inefficient and redundant.

The best source I've found on that topic is Indiana University neuroscientist Karin Harman James. Her body of work draws a fairly clear line between teaching children to manipulate and write by hand instead of typing and "significant changes in the brain".

The former chief resident in neurology at the UCLA School of Medicine, Judy Willis, is a big advocate for writing as she believes the evidence is that it is responsible for brain changes (she has a nice interview on the topic here.

Interesting - it still leaves me to wonder whether there are other skills that are equally valuable. Many skills that were once essential are replaced by technology over time. In the past, handwriting would have been a greater sign of practical intelligence because it was a requirement for some forms of communication. Now it's been partially replaced and it's as much a choice as a requirement (this will only be more so in the future). There must be other skills that also serve a similar purpose in developing the ability to think more thoroughly.

A couple of years ago, I took a college class. I was a non-traditional student as a 30-some year old. I learned cursive in grade school, although my skill had degraded a little bit into a mix of cursive and my own style. I thought my handwriting could be better. Nothing prepared me for the handwriting styles of today's college students. Most of them looked like what I would expect from students in first or second grade. Blocky printing and poorly formed printing at that. I was shocked.

For my own day-to-day use, writing is indispensable. Although there are many computer applications that can replace a lot of my note taking, I find that notes that I keep on my computer tend to get lost or forgotten in the filesystem. That's why today I use a binder with dividers and looseleaf paper. This is where I keep my notes for various projects and ideas and goals. I write in this every single day. I find that I am not able to keep track of this volume of information, or even able to think things through properly without writing on paper.

I'd be curious to see the relation of writing long-hand to college degree. I remember my days in high-school and before (unless I am having a serious mental block, US English doesn't have a word encompassing grades K-12, I believe in UK English it is primary school), and used cursive often at the time. Getting a degree in engineering basically untaught much of my writing lessons. I don't think there was anything specific to writing in print rather than cursive, but I think the type of information we were writing down, mostly numbers, figures, and equations, led most everyone to drop cursive because it is not conducive to math. I do, however, remember specific classes that taught us aspiring students how to write like an engineer, without emotion or excessive descriptors, and as succinct as possible. It works well in the STEM fields, but is pretty much the opposite of everything I was taught growing up. I still remember my cursive and could certainly read it, but my writing would be quite slow if I took it up again. I just hope I don't develop dementia because of it.

-Ian Francis

Fellow engineer (undergrad) with the same cursive to block experience. I tried cursive today and it was horrendous, but entertaining. I'll try it for 21 days and see if I can make it a habit. Is it wrong that I like that some others can't read it?

I am an engineer that deals with equations so I use whiteboards a lot, there is no option to use a computer keyboard. Hard to believe natural selection wired us for cursive, it's use is much too recent in our evolution. Probably because cursive punishes mistakes forces you to think it though, much like the old ribbon based typewriters.

Natural selection wired us for physically manipulating and mimicking figures as symbols (the benefits are for writing longhand, not cursive, specifically; cursive is just a more efficient way of doing it in most cases). There are some fairly complex cave drawings in Europe going back 40,000 years, and the average familial age between reproduction for humans throughout history has been in the high twenties, so it's been at least 1,400 or 1,500 generations. This evolved into text (how long it took is an open question; no one knows for sure whether the Tărtăria tablets really are the oldest known example of script).

The complexity is young, so I don't think cursive, proper, had anything to do with it, but the idea of physically representing an object, either through diagrams or letters, isn't, especially if it lead to greater reproductive opportunities as it is a superior tool. We saw how rapid adaptation can happen (200 years or less) in a genome thanks to the now famous evolutionary trajectory of the Peppered Moth in England during the Industrial Revolution, so I don't think 40+ millennia is unreasonable. There seems to be some sort of important neurological process that involves being able to picture an item, contemplate its physical form and spacial dimensions, then attempt to reproduce it that triggers multiple internal systems. My guess - and that's all it is - is that identifying and smacking a button is far less demanding.

When it comes to the improvement in writing quality (sans the spacial recognition, etc.) I think you could very well be right that the reason cursive or longhand, in general, results in better thinking outcomes is because one has to stop and contemplate what is going on the page before writing. That simple reflection could make all the difference in the world. It's definitely worth consideration and it would seem to make sense!

Like many others, I learned to write cursive in grade school. I remember it being one of the first times I really struggled in school, as my fine motor skills were rather weak compared to my classmates. Eventually, though, it became fairly ingrained and I wrote essentially everything in cursive script for a couple of years, and then finally adopted the mixed script that I use today. That said, I probably use more separation than most people who write mixed script; I was a mathematics student in college, which required clear symbol separation. On the other hand, my symbols and letters tend to have a fair number of flourishes. I was also taught formal block printing (for an architectural drafting course) in high school. That was far worse than cursive; it was both unnatural feeling and put a lot of strain on my hand.

What I find interesting though, anecdotally speaking, is that writing longhand seems to make it easier to not just remember, but think through ideas. I write scientific software as part of my work, and I often find myself writing lists and diagrams by hand so I can get a clearer picture of what I'm doing. I'm sure this is fairly common, but I've even taken to writing trickier code snippets by hand first, as for some reason, it's easier for me to reason through the logic and compare it against the mathematics it's derived from when writing with a pen or pencil. It's a curious thing; I wonder if there's some priming effect from writing longhand, perhaps in locally sensitising the neurons near those activated by writing longhand. Seems likely that would trigger the spatial reasoning module, and this perhaps bleeds over into logical reasoning. An un-informed hypothesis, as it were.

On the other side, there's an interesting question in why doesn't typing cause this? What makes them different? The fact that there's less specific action associated with each symbol? (Hitting any given key is pretty similar to hitting any other given key, unlike penning symbols, so perhaps that's difference.)

Your process sounds almost identical to mine when I am analyzing a business or mapping out a strategy for something. I have a huge whiteboard that I will go and stand in front of, as well as a pile of notebooks, and I'll have to draw it out by hand to "get" it. Suddenly, the logic of it makes much more sense.

My suspicion is your hypothesis on typing (hitting any given key is pretty similar to hitting any other given key) is probably correct. I can't prove it, but it would seem to fit with the evidence that the benefit of longhand (not cursive, specifically, but just the act of writing) seems to have to do with the brain making those spacial connections to manipulate the figures.

My whiteboard has only recently re-aquired a place to live; I find it helps immensely, but in a different way. I've found the whiteboard is generally more useful for 'large-scale' thinking. Sketching ideas, structuring plans or projects, and so on. On the other hand, my notebooks tend to be filled with details: calculations, bits of code, and so on. I'm curious, do you find a similar dicotomy in how you use your different tools? I wonder if there's something, perhaps to do with standing as opposed to sitting, or merely the size of space, that affects how one works with their tools, or if it's just something idiosyncratic.

As for typing, if it's true that the important difference is between associating specific movements with specifics symbols (as with writing), then it might suggest we draw on some level of procedural memory when trying to access factual information. As if we stored the abstract knowledge of what we write down in both our brain and muscles (metaphorically, of course, it would really just be two sections of the brain.) That would seem to fit with the studies you've linked to.

I do an exercise from a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It involves writing "Morning Pages" every morning, which is 3 long hand pages on paper. I've tried to do it with typing and the difference in what I got and how I felt was night and day, writing them out by hand in my experience is clearly superior in terms of my getting the benefit from the exercise. For those who are curious here's a link with some more info (note: not affiliated in any way other than having bought and enjoyed Julia's book): http://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

I can also add some anecdotal fuel to the cursive fire.

When I was studying for my professional accounting designation I had a really hard time getting great grades in the business case component. I took a highly lauded prep course to bring my grade up. The course involved two 8 hours days of furious , almost non-stop, note taking. The Prof made all of us take notes by hand in cursive and even brought a big pile of foolscap and pens for people who needed them. She cited a lot of the same source material that Joshua referred to. I went from being the equivalent of a C case writer to an A case writer after taking the class. I could also write cases much more quickly which ended up saving me loads of study time. I can still remember many of the most important concepts from that class, however I also remember straining to write the notes fast enough, my hand muscles were not used to it.

Given the differences between cursive and print, I wonder what are the efficiency differences between an alphabetic printing system like English vs a logographic system like Chinese. Logographic systems are probably more difficult to learn given that there are thousands of characters and not as much recombination that can occur in a language such as English. This created a very sharp distinction between the literate scholarly class in China compared to the rest of the population. There was this distinction in Europe during the dark ages, but literacy drastically improved during the industrial area, whereas China had a literacy rate of around 20% around the end of World War II. Now of course this can be influenced by other factors such as industrialization rates, wealth, and other socio-economic and institutional factors (literacy in China is now close to on par with Western Countries), but I'm curious as to how the discussion on brain structures would apply to this difference in writing systems. The curious thing is that although China now has a phonetic system (pinyin), traditional logographic systems are still the staple of writing in China.

Based on this, do you worry if your project to switch your library to digital/e-books will affect your retention of things you read, since your margin notes, etc. will be typed instead of long-hand?

Yes. Significantly. I think the next couple of years will avoid it becoming a problem, though, as handwriting technology on tablets and touch screens is becoming very precise. I think we're probably only a few years away from me having a 20"+ tablet-like device that I can write on just like paper. Until then, if I have to take handwritten notes in a separate binder, I may continue to do that.

Are you still using regular pen and paper? I’ve just started using an iPad and Apple Pencil and its incredible.

Until the coming of the typewriter at the end of the 19th century, handwriting was part of a good education. After the typewriter, we began to see handwriting as unnecessary. We felt that machine writing was superior, as it was used for "business." I'm surprised it lasted as long as it has.

With a handwritten letter, the writer makes a personal connection with the reader. It shows respect in a way the typewritten page can never do. The machine depersonalizes the human experience. Our high regard for the machine is misplaced.

The demise of longhand is an early result of our journey toward illiteracy.

I'm not sure what to think of the rest of the article, since I might have just been a slow cursive writer, but in my honest opinion, I think that the "This should be no harder to read than print" declaration is plain wrong. Even zoomed in, if analyzing each word letter by letter, it's fairly difficult to confirm what a letter says, especially if it is a long one (h, l, f, etc.). Unless "purpose" was spelled as "hurpose" in the olden days of yore, I, for one, think that the Declaration of Independence was written more for display than comprehension.
(I also read line 6's "happiness" as "Slappinefs," and couldn't quite figure out what it said without googling. Even now I doubt that said word isn't Slappinefs.)

(As for myself, I used to write in cursive until a teacher complained that it was really hard to read and encouraged me to write in print. Nowadays, I use a scrawling print that might as well be my own brand of cursive, and, to more or less everyone including myself, it looks much more legible. As a teacher's assistant at a middle school internship, practically everyone's handwriting was legible except for this one kid that used blue pen and wrote in skinnily-fat cursive (That phrasing would make sense if you saw his handwriting), so there seems to be some sort of discrepancy between what this article advertises in terms of legibility in theory and in real life.)

typo: brain industry should be brain injury

Thanks for spotting that! I just fixed it.