A recent study, “,” reinforces this, showing that the physical act of forming letters strengthens memory and accelerates learning. Far from being a relic of the past, handwriting is a powerful tool that prepares young students for reading, improves their cognitive abilities and builds the groundwork for becoming confident, capable writers.

The power of handwriting comes from the way it engages multiple senses at once. Unlike typing, which relies on a single, repetitive motion, handwriting activates multiple areas of the brain by combining visual, auditory and kinesthetic input. When children form a letter, they’re engaging in a dynamic process that solidifies its identity in their mind. This graphomotor movement — the coordination of hand and eye to produce letters — is key to remembering them.Explicitly teaching children to form letters by hand, even through simple methods like having them copy words from a correctly written letter, word or sentence, and better retain letter and word structures.

This practice has a powerful ripple effect. Once letter formation becomes automatic, a child’s brain is freed to focus on higher-level thinking. Instead of struggling to recall how to write a letter, a child can concentrate on building sentences, expressing thoughts and ideas, and crafting coherent narratives. This is how fluent writing develops. And the benefits extend well beyond childhood: found college students who took notes by hand remembered more than those who typed, likely because writing by hand forces the brain to process and summarize information, not just copy it.

The key to effective handwriting instruction is structured, straightforward direct teaching, explicit modeling, guided practice and immediate feedback. Just as important, handwriting should be woven into the natural rhythm of the day and made part of all subjects. Students can practice numbers in math, label diagrams in science or write vocabulary words in social studies. Treating handwriting as a universal skill reinforces its importance and makes it feel natural in students’ academic lives. This approach builds stronger readers and more confident writers across every subject.

One common challenge in handwriting instruction is pushing students into writing before they’re developmentally ready. For younger learners, a developmentally appropriate approach means starting with gross motor activities that strengthen the shoulder and core, followed by fine motor practice using multisensory tools like clay, sand or chalk. These activities prepare the hand and brain for writing long before a pencil ever touches paper. By allowing students to master these foundational movements, teachers can prevent bad habits from forming and build the confidence necessary to successfully transition to paper-and-pencil tasks, setting students up for fluent, legible writing.

For students with learning differences such as dyslexia or dysgraphia, handwriting can be particularly helpful. Cursive, with its fluid, connected strokes, can help reduce letter reversals and provides a rhythmic pattern that helps children process words as whole units rather than a series of disconnected letters. For students with dysgraphia, the continuous motion of cursive can ease the fine-motor demands of repeatedly lifting and placing the pencil, making writing feel more manageable and less fragmented. The continuous movement can engage the brain’s reading circuits and help improve memory and fluency. The sense of accomplishment gained from mastering this skill can be transformative. 

Handwriting isn’t an old-fashioned skill; it’s central to reading, writing and cognitive development. Prioritizing evidence-based handwriting instruction in pre-K through fifth grade lays the foundation for spelling, sentence-building and clear written communication. Strong handwriting skills support literacy and can enhance learning across other academic areas by building focus, confidence and cognitive connections.

Administrators and teachers can have a lasting impact by ensuring handwriting instruction is explicit, structured and prioritized in the early grades. By providing educators with the knowledge, tools and time they need, schools can ensure that every child has the opportunity to develop this essential skill. It is a small investment that can pay off for a lifetime, helping students feel capable and successful in their learning.

Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.”

FRANKFORT — A Republican senator wants to ensure that students become proficient in cursive handwriting in Kentucky’s public elementary schools.

Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, of Smithfield, presented , which would require cursive writing to be taught “as a course of study” in elementary schools, to the House Education Committee Tuesday. The Senate has already passed the bill.

Tichenor said she filed it as a response to the handwriting style not being part of , which began in 2010 as a way to bring cohesion to the way states taught English and math.  More than 20 states, including , have adopted directives to require teaching cursive writing.

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Kentucky’s standards for elementary education already include instruction in cursive and print handwriting.

Under the cursive writing is taught to second- and third-graders, and print letters to kindergarteners and first graders.

State law gives school superintendents authority over instructional resources and assessments for meeting goals. School councils are also required to adopt a program consistent with policies from their local boards of education. Principals are required to ensure the implementation of the program in school curriculum.

Tichenor’s bill says that beginning in the 2025-26 school year, “cursive writing shall be included as a course of study in all elementary schools and shall be designed to ensure proficiency in cursive writing by the end of grade five.”

Tichenor said that learning cursive can improve literacy skills. A found that writing in cursive activates different electrical activity in the brain for students compared to when they type.

“Every grandma out there who sends a birthday card is going to be so happy that their grandkids can read their birthday cards,” Tichenor said.

While Tichenor received a lot of positive feedback, some representatives raised concerns about implementing the requirement in schools.

Rep. Lisa Willner, D-Louisville, said that she was often contacted as a former school board member about requests to teach cursive. She did raise concerns about the requirement becoming another burden for teachers, especially those who might not feel comfortable teaching the material and as Kentucky faces a shortage of teachers in classrooms.

McKee Republican Rep. Timmy Truett, a school principal, said he sees education trending toward technology over written assignments. He gave an example of a statewide writing test that is now submitted on a computer.

“I almost think that typing in the world we live (in) would be more important than the cursive writing,” Truett said.

Tichenor responded that cursive writing encourages students to use motor skills. She also said she has not had a lot of teachers reach out to her with Willner’s concerns.

Both Willner and Truett ultimately voted for the bill. The House Education Committee forwarded the bill to the full House with 15 yes votes, one no and a pass vote.

Tichenor’s legislation must now be approved by  the House before it can be considered by Gov. Andy Beshear for signature.

A spokesperson for the Kentucky Department of Education said it does not have a comment on the legislation at this time.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

In 2016, California Democratic state Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva sat with then-California Gov. Jerry Brown at an event where he signed baseball-type cards featuring the image of his dog, Colusa.

But many of the recipients of the cards couldn’t read his cursive signature, Quirk-Silva recalled, much to the Democratic governor’s dismay. “The governor asked me what I did” before becoming a legislator, she remembered. “I said I was a teacher, and he said, ‘You have to bring back cursive writing.’”

After seven years of trying, she finally succeeded.

Last month, the California legislature unanimously passed and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring the teaching of cursive or “joined italics” handwriting in grades one through six.

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While grandparents’ sprawling handwriting on birthday cards or treasured family recipes may spring to mind when many younger people think of cursive, some educators today think it’s a skill worth reviving even — or maybe especially — in an age when most kids spend hours every day on their smartphones. But others think students already have too many subjects to master and that their fingers belong on keyboards.

Some California teachers already were teaching cursive, but not usually in underresourced schools, Quirk-Silva said in an interview.

She argued cursive is valuable to read historical documents, increases writing speed and has become a popular way for teachers to make sure students are not using artificial intelligence to craft their written work.

Teaching cursive in public schools waned after the Common Core standards, which most states adopted, didn’t include cursive in the recommended curriculum. Critics of cursive requirements say time in the classroom could be better spent on new skills such as coding and keyboarding. And Quirk-Silva recalled that some younger lawmakers called the looping writing style “old-fashioned.”

Supporters recently have had some success in bringing it back, pointing to studies that show a link between cursive and cognitive abilities, including helping with reading and writing disabilities such as dyslexia and dysgraphia.

In May, New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill requiring schools to teach cursive and multiplication tables.

More than 20 states have implemented state directives to teach cursive in the past decade or so, according to Connie Slone, founder of MyCursive.com, a company that provides cursive learning materials to teachers and schools.

A few others don’t require cursive, but instead encourage it without specific mandates, according to the Zaner-Bloser company, another cursive instructional vendor.

But critics of teaching cursive remain skeptical. There’s “not much evidence that cursive matters,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California.

“If you are going to spend time on some indication of written communication, keyboarding skills are more important,” Polikoff said. “In the scheme of educational policies, I’m not sure there’s a single topic I care less about. We’ve fallen behind during COVID, we’re dealing with chronic absenteeism, student mental health is in crisis, and we’re spending time on cursive? That’s what we’re mandating?”

The Indiana legislature and governor this year changed a bill that would have required cursive, amending it so that it now only requires a study of the use of cursive in public schools. An education department report is due Dec. 1.

Over the past few years, cursive bills have been introduced but not taken up in several states, Slone said, including Colorado, Minnesota and Washington.

The late William Klemm, a neuroscience professor at Texas A&M University, is widely cited by advocates for his article a decade ago in Psychology Today maintaining that learning cursive “is an important tool for cognitive development.” Cursive helps to train “the brain to learn ‘functional specialization’ — that is, the capacity for optimal efficiency,” he wrote.

A 2019 published by PLOS One and listed in the National Library of Medicine, found that “there is increasing evidence that mastering handwriting skills play an important role on academic achievement.”

And a 2020 from researchers in Norway made the direct connection between “writing by hand” and “synchronized activity” in a particular part of the brain “important for memory and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning.” The study recommended that all forms of writing — printing, cursive and typing — be taught to strengthen “both cognitive development and learning efficiency.”

Suzanne McLeod, coordinator of educational leadership at Binghamton University, a state university of New York, said cursive developed into wide use during the quill pen-and-ink era before the 1800s. It was largely because quill pens tended to blot when they were lifted off the page, she said. That means centuries of historical documents are written in cursive, and historians have to be able to read it to do original research.

“Not to have an underpinning in basic cursive where the letters connect would mean that you would need remediation in that area,” she said. “You would find it absolutely unapproachable.”

In Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Brenda Carter this year succeeded in getting a bill through the state House that encouraged — though didn’t require — teaching cursive. There was virtually no opposition, she said. But the state Senate never took up the bill before adjourning.

Carter said she is seeking GOP backing for the measure and is encouraged because the state Department of Education supports it.

“Our young people are missing out on so much,” she said. “All of the founding documents are written in cursive. Where is our history if we can’t read this? Are we depriving future generations of our history?”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .