Cursive is for dead people. That’s the first thing I remember a classmate of mine remarking in third grade when our teacher informed us we’d be entering a unit on cursive, which we’d need to produce as proficiently as print. I’ll admit, after a healthy dose of perhaps a dozen worksheets dragging me through the motions of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” but in loopy, infuriatingly slow cursive, I believed my classmate. 

As the years have gone on, though, my perspective on cursive has been inverse to society’s perspective on cursive. As we continued delving into digital technology, cursive as a form of handwriting became antiquated. Typing and printing, which is handwriting in the style of type, are still socially acceptable, but people using cursive are given an eyebrow raise at best. 

This is ridiculous! To each their own, but let’s stop harassing cursive. There’s a reason it was how we wrote for centuries-it hosts an abundance of benefits to its users that neither type nor print do. 

Firstly, cursive is physically easier to write than print. Not only is it faster once learned, but the movement is more natural. None of that stop-start-stop-start nonsense. With cursive, each word is one line of ink, save for the dots of i’s and j’s, or the crosses of x’s and t’s. It should be noted that such extra strokes are inexorable from the writing process, due to their physical form. 

Cursive consists of five strokes, all of them beginning from the bottom and moving upward. Consequently, cursive writers, especially young children, avoid having to remember where to start certain letters, as they might with h’s or p’s. 

Thanks to this fluid motion, cursive writers save both time and effort compared to print writers, who must pick up their writing utensils every single letter. I tried it myself, and found that when writing the first segment of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” monologue, which is 39 words, it took me 1.19.47 minutes in print, but 1.11.35 in cursive. 

The dismissal I hear most frequently of cursive is typing, particularly that typing is the recordkeeping of the future and printing is its manual derivative. Well, if there’s one thing that everyone has use for, it’s fine motor skills. Cursive champions over typing and print when it comes to minute feats of coordination. Moving your writing utensil continuously, through the loops and the connections rather than making a bunch of individual strokes or pressing flatly on a key encourages writers to perfect subtle wrist movements and hold steady control over the pressure of their fingers. It’s really difficult to chicken scratch in cursive, and once you’ve mastered neatness, the fine motor skills carry into everything. 

Typing provides none of these skills, and although print yields them, the effects are nowhere near as prominent as in cursive. Providing kids with these strengthened fine motor skills aids them in grabbing, eating, crafting, and even…typing. Take that, typing. 

Lastly, and most importantly, cursive is better for your brain than typing and printing. I’m not making this up. 

According to the Colombia Missourian, cursive has been shown to “improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing.” 

The New York Times says people who write in cursive are known to process the information they write better than those who print and type as well, possibly due to the physical connections between letters and words which necessitate more awareness when writing. They even scored better on the SATs. The Journal Academic Therapy says that “”first graders who learned to write in cursive received higher scores in reading words and in spelling than a comparable group who learned to write in [print].” 

Faster than printing. Better for fine motor skills than printing or typing. Brain boosting. Yet, cursive fades, a dead man’s habit. Common Core curriculum, which is used by 46 states, doesn’t mandate the instruction of cursive, and according to the LA Times, only 15% of SAT essays were written in cursive in 2021. For all of cursive’s perks, society has let cursive become just another casualty of technology.

Let’s reconsider. The potential of the future does not discredit the merit of the past. 

And, it’s fun to write loop-de-loops.