Cursive is Back in Style?
I was born in the year 2000 and remember learning how to write cursive very early in my education, around grade one. After that point, cursive writing was never enforced in my schooling ever again. Today, cursive writing has been added to the Ontario school curriculum again as a mandatory subject to teach from grades 3-8. Why? Amongst many other reasons, simply, children who practice cursive develop automaticity faster, which means that students can focus on getting their ideas down on paper quicker rather than spending so much time focusing on letter formation (Jones, 2023).
I’ve had experiences where my teachers in high school or university would provide me with written feedback, and I would not be able to understand their feedback because I couldn’t read true cursive. Nonetheless, as someone who will be teaching cursive in the classroom, I know it is time for me to learn how to write and read in cursive for my career.
Once upon a time, cursive was how everyone wrote. The introduction of cursive in schools is only telling us adults in post-secondary that we should all start introducing cursive back into our own lives.
THIS is why: We are so used to typing our notes out and brainstorming for papers and projects on laptops, that we don’t think about there possibly being a more effective way of doing these tasks. Research proves that writing in cursive is more fluid, which allows for more uninterrupted thought while writing (Newton, 2021). I don’t know about you all, but I have a bad case of writer’s block. Possibly, maybe, if adults were to take the initiative to learn cursive again as the future generations will, it could also make our academic lives easier… no more 3 a.m. thoughts thinking about how to get my third sentence down on the page after staring at a work-in-progress essay for hours.
Of course, it will take time to be fluent in cursive if you are not already, but the future looks to be cursive, so maybe we should take the chance and try it! As a student on a budget, I will be purchasing this cursive writing practice book for adults (under 10 dollars!) from Indigo/Chapters: Here.
Resources:
Jones, A. (2023, June 22). Cursive is making a comeback: Ontario to make learning script mandatory in school. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontario-1.6885628.
Newton, L. K. F. (2021). Print or Cursive, Which Works Best? Academy NorthWest. https://academynw.com/print-or-cursive-which-works-best/#:~:text=Cursive%27s%20fluid %20motion%20makes%20it,%2Dyear%2Dold%20to%20lear