Cursive Writing 

There are two basic kinds of handwriting, printing and Cursive. Printing tends to be neat and blocky whereas cursive is fancier. In school, students learn both but it is the cursive writing that is taught to the older kids. Since it is more complex, you need to have better motor skills. There are more loops and whorls and curls and younger students have all they can do to grip the pencil correctly, never mind learn cursive.

It is a proud day when a student first learns cursive. There are a few different methods and the one you learn will depend on the school and maybe even the generation. The method that our grandparents learned, for example, may be a lot different than what is being taught in the schools now. Back then, people wrote more letters and needed to have good cursive writing. Now, people use computers more than anything and cursive writing is less important. However, it is something that you still need to learn.

As schooling progresses, a student may stick completely to cursive or once high school comes along, they may realize that printing or a combination of printing and cursive works best for note taking. It simply is not efficient to take notes exclusively in cursive because it takes too long to write and you may miss key elements of the lecture or class discussion because you are too busy writing. This is the time when a student will adapt his or her writing and whether or not they eventually return to cursive later on in their lives is up to them.

Some people completely abandon cursive because of how much time it takes to complete it. We live in a culture where speed is highly valued. Things that take a while, such as cursive, often are not. Yes, it is beautiful when done correctly. But writing is highly functional and not always considered a thing of beauty so it has fallen out of favor. This is a shame because cursive writing can enhance any document, especially when it comes to letter writing. As a result of this falling out of favor, many of us have poor cursive writing and could stand to use a touch up when it comes to our skills. This is worth the effort because writing in cursive will force us to slow down and enjoy the process of writing more.

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