Cursive writing   ̶   a style of handwriting where the letters are joined together in a continuous flow   ̶   used to be standard practice in schools but has fallen out of use and is no longer mandatory in Maltese schools. 

In the past, we used to write by hand: everything from simple messages on birthday cards, through letters to friends, family, and authorities, to essays or books.  Now, it is all down to the laptop or mobile and sometimes the electronic gadgets even auto-fill the words for us.

Writing in cursive means translating thoughts into words; it forces the writer to the writer to associate ideas, link them, and put them in a sequence relating to each other. It is not by chance that the word cursive come from the Latin “currere”, which means to run, to flow, because thought is winged: it runs, it flies.

“Have you ever wondered why children are no longer taught to write in cursive?”  It is not by chance that they tend to use it less and less.  Cursive seems to have no place in today’s world   ̶   a world that does everything possible to slow down the development of thought.

Cursive makes for compact, elegant, and clear writing.  But ours is a society that no longer has time for elegance, for beauty, for complexity; we have synthetics but not clarity, speed but not efficiency, information but not knowledge! In general, we know too much and too little because, generally speaking, we are no longer able to put things into relation.

I might add that most people can no longer think.  You can see it from all the nonsense written on the social media.  Read the comments on any article or news item, and a good 90 percent of them will show that those who wrote them didn’t even read the article or news, let alone understand what they said, but are just an instantaneous reaction to a headline.  Most of the comments are inspired by the writer’s pre-conceived ideas, most of which have been developed in the social media eco-chamber and are regurgitated over and over in a mechanistic way, out of context.  You would be baffled by the lack of relation between the news and the comments.

I believe that one of the reasons for this inability to think is the abandonment of cursive writing.  It has meant that people have not developed their cognitive skills by integrating fine motor skills with visual and tactile processing.   This is because typing activates different neurological pathways than handwriting, which increases connectivity between brain regions, especially those involved in memory formation.

It is also a scientific fact that the fluid motion of cursive writing, unlike typing, provides a type of kinesthetic stimulation that helps different parts of the brain develop and integrate.  A study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that cursive handwriting helps the brain learn and remember better, apart from which cursive writing can also help train the brain for functional specialisation, which is the ability to work efficiently.

The situation in Malta

The situation in Malta is worrying.  Way back in 2018, Malta Today reported that careless presentation, undecipherable handwriting, and a lack of neatness had become recurrent problems among primary school pupils.  A benchmark exam report on the performance of primary schoolchildren had complained that kids are “scribbling, not writing”.

The examiners had lamented that students were not being equipped with basic writing skills.  The report called on teachers to revise “certain practices” like fill-in-the-blanks exercises which were not helping students in learning how to write full sentences. The examiners also noted incoherent and fragmented writing, misuse of tenses, limited vocabulary, haphazard use of memorised proverbs and idiomatic expressions, failure to follow instructions and lack of knowledge of the basic elements in story writing.

What the examiners said about our schoolchildren in 2018 applies, in my experience, to many grown-ups today.  Having had the opportunity to work with many people at various levels in different workplaces, I can vouch for the fact that a good number of graduates from the University of Malta or other educational institutions find it difficult to write coherently.  Trying to make sense of sentences that are incomplete, have non sequences, or are written in bad grammar is quite often impossible.     

Many people believe that being a good writer is simply an inborn talent.  But research conducted by Steve Graham, a professor of education at Arizona State University, challenge that myth.  He believes that pretty much everyone can learn to become skilled.

The ability to write is clearly one method by which students can demonstrate habits of mind and critical thinking skills. Writing ability can serve as an index of other cognitive functions.  According to Dr. William Klemm, senior professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University and author of 20 books, cursive can make children more intelligent. It helps train the brain to integrate various forms of information at once, including visual and tactile inputs, while applying fine motor skills. Dr. Klemm suggests cursive can provide similar benefits to the brain as learning to play a musical instrument.

However, beautiful cursive handwriting is fun to learn and is considered a dying art form by many.

A study by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) reaffirms the importance of “old-fashioned” cursive handwriting in the 21st-century’s Computer Age.  Using electroencephalogram (EEG) tests that measure electrical activity in the brain, they found that, even if students use digital pens and write by hand on an interactive computer screen, cursive handwriting helps the brain learn and remember better.

Some schools have become completely digital and skip handwriting training altogether.   Audrey van der Meer, a neuropsychology professor at NTNU, says that “given the development of the last several years, we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand. Our research and that of others show that this would be a very unfortunate consequence of increased digital activity.”

Some people dismiss the importance of handwriting by referring to the fact that the world is increasingly going digital.   But it is also a fact that there are many occasions when we need to write something on paper – post-its, notes, signing our names, filling out forms at the doctor’s office, workplaces – you name it. We really cannot not get by without any handwriting.

This is another reason why we should go back to writing in cursive, especially in schools. Because it is not just about recovering a dying writing style. It is also about giving breath to our thoughts again. By incorporating handwriting into daily life, especially in schools, we can nurture cognitive, emotional, and social growth in children, and rediscover the joy of putting thoughts into beautiful, flowing words.

Photo: Anna Tarazevich