Bonnie Morris has been keeping a journal for roughly 50 years. She used to read thousands of students’ essays for the Advanced Placement U.S. History exam. When she grades her students’ work, she writes her comments in the margins.
But now, the professor of history at University of California, Berkeley is finding these common practices to be a point of tension: Her students can’t understand her handwritten feedback. They lament writing out their exam essays by hand. Her graduate student assistants, hired to help her with grading, can’t read those handwritten exams with the same ease she can.
“I feel very intimately connected to students when I sit down and write by hand on their paper and go line by line,” Morris said. “That process, which is very familiar to me, I think is changing.”
Researchers say that handwriting is linked to academic success. Historians, like Morris, worry what is lost if people can’t discern primary sources, which are largely handwritten. Those concerns have reached state education departments and legislatures, with at least 24 states now having some kind of cursive requirement for K-12 schools.
But there are still cohorts of students whose education didn’t emphasize handwriting and cursive—who aren’t familiar with the curls and swoops and swirls. And a body of marketing research that emphasizes the importance of readable text may spell a movement away from script in some spaces, like a small college in Maryland, which recently became the butt of the joke on late night TV.
A viral moment sparks the discussion around cursive
The push and pull of teaching cursive and penmanship has been ongoing since the mid-2010s, after most states adopted the Common Core State Standards, which did not expressly mention cursive but did emphasize keyboarding. Since then, though, there’s been a resurgence of cursive and handwriting education.
Less than 10 years ago, only 14 states required schools to teach cursive—but that number has been steadily increasing. This year, Kentucky became the latest to legislate the matter, with children expected to be proficient by grade 5 under a measure set to begin next school year. Iowa’s education department this year also announced a cursive requirement for elementary schools.
Despite the uptake of measures, many students, like Morris’s, still struggle with handwriting—doing their own, and reading others’. Washington College, a small liberal-arts college on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, had a viral moment online last month after it announced a new logo, leaving behind the old rendering of George Washington’s cursive signature because it was “difficult to read and not immediately recognizable for many prospective students.”
“If only there was some sort of institution of learning that could help people understand words!” Stephen Colbert joked last week, the college’s now-retired logo floating beside him.
It’s not quite that simple, though. For one, Morris isn’t convinced students would sign up to take a cursive class in college. Also, it’s yet another demand on time-strapped elementary teachers, who have historically reported challenges in teaching it. In a survey of elementary teachers in the early 2000s, just 12 percent of respondents agreed that they had received adequate preparation to teach handwriting in their college classes.
There’s also an area of research called fluency that looks at how information is processed by the mind, and how that ease shapes judgements, perceptions, and behaviors, said Anoosha Izadi, a professor of management & marketing at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. (It shouldn’t be confused with reading fluency, in which young children learn to read accurately and efficiently.)
The easier and clearer information is to process, the more people tend to like it, and remember it, she said. That goes for fonts, too.
“Since students today are often less familiar with cursive and find it harder to read, it lacks fluency,” she wrote in an email. “A more readable logo might be more engaging and resonate better with prospective students.”
That’s essentially the argument Washington College made in its rebuttal to its virality, citing other legacy brands like Eddie Bauer, a retail company, moving away from cursive for similar reasons.
“The lack of teaching cursive was, for us, an important but secondary issue,” Brian Speer, the college’s vice president of marketing and communication, wrote on Oct. 30. “The 18th-century script of Washington’s signature was the primary impediment to legibility because it features letterforms that bear no resemblance to modern scripts.”
Speer concedes there’s a fondness for the old logo from alumni, and they plan to retain the script to create more dynamic designs, like a watermark. “But,” he continued, “as a primary logo, it simply does not work.”
The push for cursive education continues for advocates, researchers, and historians
Before students even get to the point of higher education, researchers are pressing for them to continue learning handwriting and cursive, because of skills gained across disciplines.
Working as an occupational therapist in a Texas school district, Hope McCarroll, a professor in the occupational therapy department at Texas Woman’s University, said teachers would refer students to her when their handwriting was illegible. McCarroll found that the students had the foundational skills: They could see and understand what they needed to write, they knew the letters and numbers, and they could move their pencil in the correct way. But there was a piece missing.
“What I was finding was these teachers didn’t have resources to actually teach handwriting,” she said. “They were seeing all these difficulties with handwriting in their classrooms, but they didn’t actually have anything to teach it with, so they weren’t teaching it.”
She began researching how handwriting impacted academic areas outside of writing. In a study of one elementary school, McCarroll compared 1st and 2nd graders’ writing samples to their report card grades and found that low legibility scores in handwriting correlated with low scores in reading, writing, and math.
The motoric and “orthographic mapping” we learn from handwriting—the process of reading words by sight and spelling from memory—helps students internalize sound-letter patterns—that the letter C could have two sounds. It’s also important for math: lining up numbers and solving equations, McCarroll said.
In Texas, cursive returned to state education standards in the 2019-20 school year, mandating instruction in legible print and legible cursive between kindergarten and 3rd grade.
“Just the fact that there’s something in kinder, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade was a huge ordeal, and I feel like a huge win for our kids,” McCarroll said.
As a historian, Morris worries about sending archivists out into the world to collect memorabilia—and the roadblocks they’ll hit if they can’t read handwritten script. For feminist history, for example, there are handwritten notes taken at club meetings, penned softball scores, or notes of women being trained for World War II.
“If we want to get all that stuff into archives and museums, we need sleuths who collect that material and make it into displays that then visitors to museums are interested in,” she said.
If educators want to incorporate more handwriting education into their lessons, Morris recommends teaching examples of historic diary entries and love letters. People, she notes, are naturally curious about those.
Morris will celebrate 50 years since she started her first journal, writing through the history she has lived. There’s something fun in drawing the swooping Y or Z or F, something that’s both art and scholarship, she said.
“It has connected me, I feel, to all the people over time who have kept diaries or recorded what’s going on in their time. Right up until this historical moment, in the history of languages, since the invention of writing, people have written by hand, in a written record,” she said. “If that changes, if that goes away, … it would be a terrible loss.”
