The New Script for Teaching Handwriting Is No Script at All

Cursive loyalists lament the loss of cursive teaching in schools. WSJ's Andy Jordan reports from San Francisco.

RALEIGH, N.C.�Across North Carolina and in dozens of other states, teachers are committing what once would have been heresy: They are writing off cursive script.

At a growing number of schools, young students are no longer tracing curving L's and arching D's with pencil and paper, no longer pausing at the end of words to dot an i or cross a t. The common core state standards, a set of math and English goals agreed upon by 45 states and now being implemented, sends cursive the way of the quill pen, while requiring instead that students be proficient in keyboarding by fourth grade.

Cursive is optional�and, so far, few schools have opted for it.

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A student types on a laptop after finishing a cursive lesson.

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Cursive alphabet

Sample cursive exercises

Entry form for handwriting contest

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"We're trying to be realistic about skills that kids are going to need," says Jill Camnitz, a longtime school board member in Greenville, N.C. "You can't do everything. Something's got to go."

No matter that children will no longer be able to read the Declaration of Independence or birthday cards from their grandparents. Sending a "Dear John" letter to cursive has been one of the rare curriculum issues that states have been able to agree on, in the yearslong debate about what students must learn in elementary, middle and high school.

And getting rid of cursive is nearly unanimously popular among students. When asked whether they should have to learn cursive, 3,000 of 3,900 middle-school students surveyed by Junior Scholastic magazine in 2010 said it should be erased. "NO! OMG, 4get cursive, it's dead!"

It is hard, after all, to argue that perfect penmanship is a job requirement, even for the people whose signatures appear on the dollar bill. Jacob Lew, President Barack Obama's choice to become treasury secretary, signs his name in nine loops that look like the squiggly icing on a Hostess CupCake.

"Jack assures me that he is going to work to make at least one letter legible in order not to debase our currency," President Obama said this month when announcing Mr. Lew's nomination.

Most adults don't write in real cursive anyway, according to handwriting experts. They use a hybrid form of writing, a mix of print and cursive letters.

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A student practices a cursive lesson.

Typing doesn't help the brain develop as much as writing in longhand, a tactile means of expression with roots in scratching on cave walls, argues handwriting analyst Michelle Dresbold. With typing, the fingers make repetitive movements rather than connect shapes, she said.

"It's a very natural process to take a crayon or a rock and make symbols with your hand," Ms. Dresbold said. "It's just bringing down things from your brain." Without that, "children are not thinking as thoroughly."

Cursive instruction is no longer required as of this school year in North Carolina elementary schools, and most are no longer teaching it, according to the state's department of public instruction.

Worried that longhand was getting short shrift, Nicki Chaffier, a seventh-grade English teacher in a Charlotte, N.C., suburb, persuaded her colleagues this past fall to stage a minor revolt when students complained they couldn't read her written comments on their papers.

The teachers all wrote on the interactive smartboard in cursive. "All the kids started freaking out," Ms. Chaffier said. "They were like, 'Why are you doing this to us?' "

She responded by creating the Lake Norman Charter School Cursive Club, which meets for 40 minutes after school on Tuesdays. It isn't as cool as the art club, or even the math club, for that matter, but she is averaging 10 students a week. "We're working on letters that have hoops, letters that have humps," she said.

Where did she find the lesson plans? "I googled them," she said.

Mary Cancellieri became interested in cursive when her mother, an emergency-room nurse who works nights, left notes on a dry-erase board to stay in touch when they didn't see one another for days. "It's a blast from the past of how things were," the seventh-grader said of her reasons for signing up for the Cursive Club. Her new skills allow her to lord it over her older brothers: Her mother says she is the only one who can read the Christmas cookie recipe handed down in the family.

Anjie Carpenter of Southwest Middle School in Charlotte says she is squeezing in cursive instruction because her 16 new English speakers remember words inscribed on paper better than those typed on school-issued iPads.

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Cursive Instructions

Last year her student Trinh Tran won the title of seventh-grade grand champion in the Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest�the equivalent of the national spelling bee of handwriting. Miss Tran, who moved to the U.S. two years ago from Vietnam, says practicing cursive helped her learn grammar and having pretty handwriting boosted her confidence. "My favorite letter is 'T,' because my name starts with it," she said.

A handful of the 45 states, including California and Georgia, are rewriting the script, adding cursive to their core standards. Others may follow their lead. An Indiana legislative committee approved a bill earlier this month to require that it be taught in all elementary schools. State Sen. Jean Leising, the bill's sponsor, said more than 90% of the 1,000 constituents she surveyed in her rural district said they favored teaching cursive.

The handwritten thank-you notes senators received recently from their teenage legislative pages may have helped push the bill through, Ms. Leising says. Most were printed or they were a scrawled combination of block and cursive letters, and some students were so used to texting "thx" that they struggled to spell "thank you," she said.

"If you would've seen some of those notes," she said, with a sigh. "I was grateful to receive them but saddened by the quality."

It is becoming increasingly rare to even have to sign your name. By 2016, nearly half of all home loans could be closed electronically, meaning that thousands of people will buy homes without having to physically sign their names, according to a recent survey by Xerox Mortgage Services.

"Progress is not always an improvement," said Marc Aronson, president of the Pennsylvania Association of Notaries. Though a specialist in electronic notarization, he mourns the gradual disappearance of the physical signature, which he said is deliberate and easy to link to the person who made it.

"If I go to a hotel and George Washington slept there, I can still read it," he said. "If George Washington signed his name on an electronic signature pad, we'd have no idea he was there."

Calligrapher Carrie Shuping, who specializes in wedding invitations, gets many requests from brides these days for a guest's name to be written in cursive or italics but the address in block print. Invitations in cursive only make up a third of her sales, even though that form is her least expensive style, at $1.40 an envelope, she said.

The writing isn't on the wall yet for cursive, even if children don't learn it in school, she said. "I would lose sleep if I thought it was dying as an art form," she said. "But as a rudimentary part of a child's education? I'm not going to cry about that."

Write to Valerie Bauerlein at valerie.bauerlein@wsj.com