Schools are spending less time than ever teaching the art of cursive handwriting, especially as more time is devoted to typing in the early grades. On the 2007 SAT essay questions, only 15% of college-bound students used cursive writing. The rest wrote in print. Some teachers argue that writing in script helps hand-eye coordination, even though average legibility peaks around 4th grade.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University’s College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they’ll replace it entirely before long.
“I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.”
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.”
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