Taking time to put pen to paper can actually increase your learning capability, retention and brain development according to many experts and studies on handwriting conducted over the past few years. While many schools are taking cursive requirements out of their curriculum and the majority of us compose our thoughts and work on computers through keyboards, we can’t let the practice and benefits of handwriting fall to the wayside.
“For children, handwriting is extremely important. Not how well they do it, but that they do it and practice it,” said Karin Harman James, an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University. “Typing does not do the same thing.”
William R. Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. agrees. In an article he wrote called “Cursive writing makes kids smarter” published on March 14, 2013 in Memory Medic, Klemm states that in the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation, movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of the brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.
He also believes there is spill-over benefit for thinking skills used in reading and writing. To write legible cursive, fine motor control is needed over the fingers. Students have to pay attention and think about what and how they are doing it. They have to practice.
There are also benefits to the physical aspects of the actual act of writing. Julie Deardorff wrote an article in the Tribune newspaper that outlined the benefits of gripping and moving a pen or pencil that reach beyond communication. She stated that emerging research shows that handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills and can predict a child’s academic success in ways that keyboarding can’t.
According to an article last year by reporter Chris Gayomali in The Wall Street Journal, some physicians claim that the act of writing — which engages your motor skills, memory, and more — is good cognitive exercise for baby boomers who want to keep their minds sharp as they age. And if you’re looking to pick up a new skill, a 2008 study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience found that adults had an easier time recognizing new characters — like Chinese, math symbols, or music notes — that were written by hand over characters generated by a computer.
“Handwriting aids memory. If you write yourself a list or a note — then lose it — you’re much more likely to remember what you wrote than if you just tried to memorize it,” said Occupational Therapist Katya Feder, an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa School of Rehabilitation.
According to Feder in the same Tribune article, handwriting proficiency inspires confidence. The more we practice a skill such as handwriting, the stronger the motor pathways become until the skill becomes automatic. Once it’s mastered, children can move on to focus on the subject, rather than worry about how to form letters.
Handwriting engages different brain circuits than keyboarding. The contact, direction and pressure of the pen or pencil send the brain a message. And the repetitive process of handwriting “integrates motor pathways into the brain,” said Feder. When it becomes automatic or learned, “there’s almost a groove in the pathways,” she said. The more children write, the more pathways are laid down.
So now you’ve heard what the experts say…keep writing! And we will keep paving the way for responsible paper production.
References:
- http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/what-learning-cursive-does-your-brain
- http://theweek.com/article/index/238801/4-benefits-of-writing-by-hand
- http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/30/should-schools-require-children-to-learn-cursive/the-benefits-of-cursive-go-beyond-writing
- http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-15/health/sc-health-0615-child-health-handwriti20110615_1_handwriting-virginia-berninger-brain-activation
- http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704631504575531932754922518
Phil Riebel
President, Two Sides North America, Inc.
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
Further research demonstrates that the fastest, clearest handwriters are neither the print-writers nor the cursive writers. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all of them – making only the simplest of joins, omitting the rest, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive matters, but even children can be taught to read writing that they are not taught to produce. Reading cursive can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds, once they read ordinary print. (In fact, now there’s even an iPad app to teach how: named “Read Cursive,” of course — http://appstore.com/readcursive .) So why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, including some handwriting style that’s actually typical of effective handwriters?
Educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority — 55 percent — wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive. When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why mandate it?
Cursive’s cheerleaders sometimes allege that cursive makes you smarter, makes you stunningly graceful, adds brain cells, instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or confers other blessings no more prevalent among cursive users than elsewhere. Some claim research support, citing studies that consistently prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident when others examine the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no traceable source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, it is misquoted or is incorrectly described (e.g., an Indiana University research study comparing print-writing with keyboarding is perennially misrepresented by cursive’s defenders as a study “comparing print-writing with cursive”),
or
/3/ the claimant _correctly_ quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
(For instance, phenomena /2/ and /3/ are common throughout the material provided by Dr. William Klemm. This is quickly evident to people following the citations he gave — many of whom commented about this on the PSYCHOLOGY TODAY blog-site for his article, as becomes evident if one reads the blog-comments there from beginning to end of the thread.)
What about signatures? In state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, then verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
The individuality of print-style (or other non-cursive style) writings is further shown by this: six months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the writing on an unsigned assignment) which of her 25 or 30 students wrote it.
All writing, not just cursive, is individual — just as all writing involves fine motor skills. That is why, six months into the school year, any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from print-writing on unsigned work) which student produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3 Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
handwritingrepair@gmail.com • HandwritingThatWorks.com
Hi Kate. Thanks for the comment. I will take a close look at the research and comments you sent. I appreciate the effort you put into your reply. I have made some changes to the blog because my point was about overall handwriting and not necessarily cursive. I did leave the research on cursive in there but I will have a look at all the stuff you recommend. Thanks again!!
Where do people get the idea that handwriting — or even script — equals “Cursive”? Cursive is just one of several forms of script writing, and it’s very far from the best of them. Other forms — like Italic and Copperplate — are much more legible, easier to learn, quicker to teach, and keep their legibility long after the student leaves school.
Cursive, on the other hand, has a nasty tendency to degenerate into that illegible scribble for which doctors are so notorious (but unfortunately not alone!), which has caused thousands of deaths from “medical error”; just ask any nurse or pharmacist. Yes, by all means, teach penmanship in the schools, but choose a better form than this! If only for all the lives it has cost us, Cursive deserves to die.
Thanks for the comment Leslie. I made a few updates to the blog based on your comment because I agree. However, I left in the research about cursive writing because it seemed quite relevant.
Re “the research about cursive writing … seemed quite relevant”:
“Seemed” isn’t “is.” As my message points out, the citations which _seem_ to relate specifically to cursive do so only by being misrepresented to seem so; other citations (those such as Harman-James’, which relate generally to handwriting) do not relate to a specific style, and did not find specific superiority/benefits for cursive that weren’t also found equally in other handwriting, (I happened to be at Dr. Harman-James’ presentation of the research you cite — and I have not been the only person pointing out, when necessary, that it has subsequently been misrepresented whenever a misrepresentation could conveniently support claims on cursive that the actual research did not support.)
“Relevance” created through misrepresentation is irrelevant.
I learned to read and write very early in life – well before school, taught and read to by my grandmother who lived with us during my early, formative years. That made school easy. Both Nan and my mother had excellent pen(wo)manship and taught me and my older siblings cursive writing early on as well.. However, what I learned in life, though my own experience and graduate classes in leaning/psychology, is that the mere act of writing things down especially at talks/lectures improved my memory greatly. I usually takes notes, using my own words, and the odd memorable quote verbatim, and sometimes adding comments or questions I wish to ask, even adding a diagram/sketch if helpful,
Any you are correct, even if the notes were mislaid, i will remember them and the pertinent points and questions they generated, without even looking at them again, I consider that as a form kinesthetic learning, which reinforced my memory from hearing or vision. It as if it builds up in layers…. each memory is somewhat like repeating the lecture three times. The instructor spoke, I listened, watched his diagram or sketch and made notes of my own, often in my own “language”, sometimes in shorthand and often substituting synonyms for those used by the speaker. I know i am a good visual learner as I lost some hearing on one side, so learned to position myself and listen more intently perhaps, but the note taking, that were only meant for me, is critical to my detailed memory, which others claim can be annoying! (:
I have used computers extensively (daily) for that last 30 years, but all my lists and draft outlines are often hand-written… sometime block printed, sometimes cursive, sometimes a blend… speed is a mitigating factor in what I decide to use.. or if others have to read those notes.
Anyway after 50 years of observing myself and others, I’ve come to an understanding of both with respect to learning.
Not sure if that adds to the debate, or just my own idiosyncratic way of understanding the world I live in.
By the way it was intended to be “learning”, not “leaning” Francis.
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