I have heard a lot of teachers and Orton-Gillingham tutors tout the benefits of cursive writing for their students with dyslexia. In my experience though, this is the wrong idea for most of our students. This recent article from the Yale Center for Dyslexia makes an argument for teaching keyboarding skills instead. “Once dyslexic students change to keyboarding [from cursive], their volume of word use increases dramatically as well as their written clarity, spelling, and overall editing.”
As someone who struggled with cursive writing myself, I can say that it just doesn’t ever “flow” for a lot of students, especially our students with dysgraphia.
Over the years, we have worked with many students who have started learning cursive writing from the beginning, and when these students also have dyslexia they struggle. They have a hard time with forming the letters properly, connecting them properly, and telling them apart from each other. Often, when we introduce them to printing they seem to form clearer images of the letters in their mind (they’re not all running together) and then learn their letter-sound associations more quickly.
One reason I have heard for cursive supposedly being better is that it prevents reversals– but our dyslexic students who learn cursive still do reverse b/d and p/q just as frequently as our dyslexic students who learn to print.
I think printing and keyboarding skills are much more important for our students. They can be taught to read cursive writing as an important life skill, but writing in cursive can be very laborious and difficult. Teaching them keyboarding skills will be much more useful for their future.
Of course, if your child attends a Suzuki, Montessori, or Waldorf school (and some other private or charter schools) they will be expected to learn cursive writing and we can help them with this task using a simplified cursive style called Handwriting Without Tears (it is how I finally learned cursive writing myself, and I can attest that it is much easier than “traditional” cursive!) Using multisensory techniques will help them learn to properly form their letters and the proper way to connect their letters.
As a dyslexic dysgraphic (who self-remediated for handwriting, and became a handwriting tutor), I agree with this — EXCEPT for the end-of-paragraph recommendation of HwTears. (A high percentage of my case-load — for reversals and for other issues — consists of “washouts” from HwTears and from the other print-then-cursive or cursive-oriented systems.)
I do teach my clients to _read_ cursive (which can be learned in 30-60 minutes, once the person reads print) — for this, my “go-to” resource is the free iPad app “Read Cursive.” For actual handwriting, I prefer the several approaches which have been designed to ensure fluent, legible, accident-resistant handwriting _without_ the need for cursive: for this need, here’s my “go-to” list of web-sites — http://www.BFHhandwriting.com,
http://www.handwritingsuccess.com,
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf,
http://www.briem.net,
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com,
http://www.italic-handwriting.org,
http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html,
http://www.freehandwriting.net/educational.html
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone • http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
Thanks for the comment Kate! We haven had good results with HWT with most of our students, but if it is not working/helping we do use Getty-Dubay style italic writing.
Hmmm … Then, if I understand what I’m reading (your comment), the program you try first is the one that isn’t going to work with all students even if it does work with a lot of them: if it fails (and only if that fails), then you bring out the simpler approach. Is there some special reason for trying the two programs in that particular order, and making the simpler one wait until _after_ there has been failure? If so, I would value an explanation. This would help me understand why such a sequencing appeals to you as a concerned professional.
HWT is the simpler approach, in my opinion for most of our students. It all depends on what type of school they are in and whether they are expected to use print or cursive. HWT has worked for all but one of our students so far!
I’m struggling to understand what would make a program with two mutually inconsistent models (HwTears print / HwTears cursive) simpler than a consistent-model program (Getty-Dubay).
By the way, does your opinion on the effectiveness of a program take into account how well (and how long) the results last after instruction ends? (In other words, do you know how the graduates write through their teen years and then as adults?)
Here’s why I ask — I have had opportunities look at the current teen/adult handwriting of people who’d reached childhood proficiency within inconsistent-model programs (HwTears and others), and I’ve also had opportunities to look at the current teen/adult handwriting of people who’d reached childhood proficiency within consistent-model programs (Getty-Dubay, Barchowsky, and some others). So far, what I’m seeing is that the latter group (consistent-model training with a simple fluent model) is the one whose members retain (or increase) their childhood proficiency when they reach ages/developmental stages where they’ll have to write more and faster. Similarly, when I look at the _less_-proficient students in either category (the below-average “bottom half” of writers who had print-then-cursive programs versus the below-average “bottom half” of those who had Getty-Dubay and its consistent-model close kin), I find that the below-average “bottom half” of the latter group (Getty-Dubay and similar) writes about as fast and clearly as the mean (the average) of the former group (HwTears and similar). Is there any particular reason that my first choice for a program should _not_ be a program whose _lower_-performing “graduates” end up writing as well as the _average_-performing “graduates” from another program?
I appreciate your opinion; I will certainly take that into account. Most of our parents do request instruction in HWT and have never heard of Getty-Dubay or Barchowsky.
Moderator … THIS (and ONLY this) is the comment I was trying to send today:
——————
Thanks! Re what most parents request — it’s difficult to request instruction in something that one has never heard of.
HwTears certainly manages to get itself “heard of”: their methods of publicity have, at least on various convenient occasions, included the misquotation of research (contact me privately if you care about details).
An interesting thing about HwTears is that those HwTears staff I’ve had contact with (including the founder) do not use HwTears handwriting as their everyday handwriting, but only during the 10-15 minutes per day that they wre teaching it. (In other words, what they sell to customers isn’t what they use themselves: to take one small example, literally ALL HwTears staff whose handwriting I’ve seen are allowing their everyday handwriting to slant, while telling their customers to do otherwise.) This isa reat contrast with the staff ofGwtty-Duby, Barchowsky, and related programs — who actually _use_ (in their everyday handwriting) what they teach.
Just out of curiosity, I ask you to take a look at the next 100 handwritten notes or other documents (cursive, printed, or a mix/hybrid/other) that you see in your daily life. How many of them — especially the ones with workable clear printing/cursive/other — have much in common with HwTears printing or cursive? … and how many of them have more in common with (say) Getty-Dubay hsn ith HwTears, regardless of how the writer was taught? Maybe expand this to include a look at handwriting-fonts in ads, store-signs, product-labels, and elsewhere that these inhabit the daily environment … Let me know what you see and think after doing this …
I understand your point, but as an adult with dygraphia I use HWT cursive and I was not able to learn it by any other method. The slant and extra fancy stuff is confusing. I use it every day myself for taking notes, teaching, etc. Besides, in their trainings they say to let the slant develop naturally; they are not against a slant. It’s just really confusing to kids. I have a whole mess of kids from Montessori, Waldorf, and Suzuki schools who can’t figure out what letter it is or how to connect it together, despite years of “using” cursive in the classroom. I think what HWT has done is made the training accessible to a vast number of teachers, so they are actually teaching decent handwriting in schools again; rather than just ignoring it completely. I agree most adults will naturally develop a print-cursive or “italic” style handwriting, but that does not mean you have to start with that.
When you say HwT worked, do you know if the method served the student in high school and beyond? I wish the owners of their HwT program would show evidence of adult success. How are these people doing with such writing as note-taking, a skill that has been seen to transmit more information than keyboarding?
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
More recently, it has also been documented that cursive does NOT objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia.
This is what I’d expect from my own experience, by the way. As a handwriting teacher and remediator, I see numerous children, teens, and adults — dyslexic and otherwise — for whom cursive poses even more difficulties than print-writing. (Contrary to myth, reversals in cursive are common — a frequent cursive reversal in my caseload, among dyslexics and others, is “J/f.”)
— According to comparative studies of handwriting speed and legibility in different forms of writing, the fastest, clearest handwriters avoid cursive — although they are not absolute print-writers either. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all: joining only the most easily joined letter-combinations, leaving the rest unjoined, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive still matters — but reading cursive is much easier and quicker to master than writing the same way too. Reading cursive, simply reading it, can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print. (There’s even an iPad app teaching kids and others to read cursive, whether or not they write it or ever will write it. The app — “Read Cursive” — is a free download. Those who are rightly concerned with the vanishing skill of cursive reading may wish to visit appstore.com/readcursive for more information.)
We don’t require our children to learn to make their own pencils (or build their own printing presses) before we teach them how to read and write. Why require them to write cursive before we teach them how to read it? Why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, such as a form of handwriting that is actually typical of effective handwriters?
Just as each and every child deserves to be able to read all kinds of everyday handwriting (including cursive), each and every one of our children — dyslexic or not — deserves to learn the most effective and powerful strategies for high-speed high-legibility handwriting performance.
Teaching material for practical handwriting abounds — especially in the UK and Europe, where such handwriting is taught at least as often as the accident-prone cursive which is venerated by too many North American educators. Some examples, in several cases with student work also shown: http://www.BFHhandwriting.com, http://www.handwritingsuccess.com, http://www.briem.net, http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com, http://www.italic-handwriting.org, http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/curriculum.html )
Even in the USA and Canada, educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37% wrote in cursive; another 8% printed. The majority — 55% — wrote with some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.
(If you would like to take part in another, ongoing poll of handwriting forms — not hosted by a publisher, and not restricted to teachers — visit http://www.poll.fm/4zac4 for the One-Question Handwriting Survey, created by this author. As with the Zaner-Bloser teacher survey, so far the results show very few purely cursive handwriters — and even fewer purely printed writers. Most handwriting in the real world — 75% of the response totals, so far — consists of print-like letters with occasional joins.)
When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it?
Believe it or not, some of the adults who themselves write in an occasionally joined but otherwise print-like handwriting tell me that they are teachers who still insist that their students must write in cursive, and/or who still teach their students that all adults habitually and normally write in cursive and always will. (Given the facts on our handwriting today, this is a little like teaching kids that our current president is Richard Nixon.)
What, I wonder, are the educational and psychological effects of teaching, or trying to teach, something that the students can probably see for themselves is no longer a fact?
Cursive’s cheerleaders (with whom I’ve had some stormy debates) sometimes allege that cursive has benefits which justify absolutely anything said or done to promote that form of handwriting. The cheerleaders for cursive repeatedly state (sometimes in sworn testimony before school boards and state legislatures) that cursive cures dyslexia or prevents it, that it makes you pleasant and graceful and intelligent, that it adds brain cells, that it instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or that it confers numerous other blessings which are no more prevalent among cursive users than among the rest of the human race. Some claim research support — citing studies that invariably prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident as soon as others examined the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, and anyone checks it out, the source turns out to have been misquoted or incorrectly paraphrased by the person citing it
or
/3/ the claimant correctly quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
Cursive devotees’ eagerness to misrepresent research has substantial consequences, as the misrepresentations are commonly made — under oath — in testimony before school districts, state legislatures, and other bodies voting on educational measures. The proposals for cursive are, without exception so far, introduced by legislators or other spokespersons whose misrepresentations (in their own testimony) are later revealed — although investigative reporting of the questionable testimony does not always prevent the bill from passing into law, even when the discoveries include signs of undue influence on the legislators promoting the cursive bill? (Documentation on request: I am willing to be interviewed by anyone who is interested in bringing this serious issue inescapably before the public’s eyes and ears.)
By now, you’re probably wondering: “What about cursive and signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive?” Brace yourself: in state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual — just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Ongoing handwriting poll: http://poll.fm/4zac4
The research most often misrepresented by devotees of cursive (“Neural Correlates of Handwriting” by Dr. Karin Harman-James at Indiana University):
https://www.hw21summit.com/research-harman-james
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
http://youtu.be/3kmJc3BCu5g
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
http://youtu.be/s_F7FqCe6To
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
http://youtu.be/Od7PGzEHbu0
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
handwritingrepair@gmail.com
Thanks for your explanation and understanding! As a dysgraphia adult, I enjoy and benefit from contact with others in similar circumstances (whether or not their experiences match mine).
Re: “as an adult with dy[s]graphia I use HWT and I was not able to learn it [handwriting] by any other method” — which other methods had you tried? Did the ones you had previously tried (and failed at) include italic methods (such as Getty-Dubay or Barchowsky) l, or had you only ever been trying methods that relied on conventional cursive and/or conventional printing instead? I’m asking because a knowledge of what people have failed with — and how — helps me improve as a teacher and producer of materials and resources.
I’m glad to hear that HwTears is now saying to “let a slant develop naturally” — this was not always what they said (to judge by my conversations with/observations of HwTears teachers and users. The ones I’ve seen and talked with — most of whom had been trained within the past 5 years — said they were taught that any slant AT ALL was difficult, was unnatural, and should never have existed at all in our handwriting. Kids in HwTears whose slant ddeveloped naturally were being reprimanded for the development — kids (and adults) were also being told (by official program materials) that the only reason anyone ever slanted in handwriting was that, once upon a time, the quill pens used for writing were made very pointy, and that this made verticals impossible.
At the time I was told this by HwTears staffers and promoters, they got very upset when I showed them photos of vertical writing done with pointed quill pens at the height of the pointed-pen era … and they got even more upset when I showed them photos of slanted writing done hundreds or even thousands of years BEFORE the invention of the pointed quill pen. (In 1997 when I was discussing this with Jan Olsen, her response to the latter was that “Oh, this would simply be a case in the result — slanted handwriting — is able to appear BEFORE its cause — the pointed pen — instead of the result appearing AFTER its cause as seems to be more usual.” — ?!?!?!)
Getting back to your own observations, though — you write: “It’s just really confusing to kids.” What does the “It” in that sentence refer to, please? I couldn’t be certain.
For what it’s worth, I get a LOT of kids from HwTears (including school-wide or district-wide HwTears implementations), just as from other cursive or print-then-cursive programs, who — as you very tellingly say — “can’t figure out what letter it is or how to connect it together, despite years of ‘using’ cursive in the classroom.”
Some people tell me that theor big reason for teaching HwTears is that “this program is the only one that allows letters to be vertical even when they connect” — and it’s been interesting to see how they respond when I document them that the Getty-Dubay program (for instance) explicitly ALSO allows the writing (with or without connections) to be vertical if the user prefers. (The most interesting response to this was from a HwTears teacher. She shrieked: “How DARE this exist? In my training, we were taught that only ONE program, ever, allowed getting rid of any slant and loops!” She also demanded to know: “How DARE any other program get rid of even more loops than ‘Handwriting without Tears’ got rid of?!” I had no answer for her question — it still perplexed me — and I wonder what you think she meant, and how you would have responded, since you know of both programs.)
Re:
”I agree most adults will naturally develop a print-cursive or ‘italic’ style of writing, but that does not mean you have to start with that.”
I’m perplexed by your thinking of it as “having to” — for me, it means I _want_ to start with that. Why _not_ start with a form that fits the likeliest “ballpark” of eventual functional outcomes?
Regarding vertical conventional cursive: This is what I learned. The Calvert School, a school situated in Baltimore teaches a vertical cursive with all lowercase letters within words joined, and the method is taught strictly from 1st-6th grade. The school’s curricula has been known for its homeschool program for well over 100 years.
The problem is that graduates from the elementary grades do not maintain the method that is so well taught. It does not conform to natural movements of the hand.
This is essentially the reason I eventually became an instructor of the italic method. The formations of letters DO conform to ease of movement and the letterforms are easy to read.
Well, I’m up for doing an experiment on myself and learning Barchowsky or Getty-Dubay method (I have the latter program; tried to use it with a high school student but he was not motivated to do it).
I have used HWT cursive to take notes; write letters; and occassionaly for shopping lists. I teach it to a few of my younger students 1:1.
I wil be interested in your results!
Dear Ms. Bray (or may I call you Dite) — Did you ever do that experiment on yourself and handwriting (Barchowsky and/or Getty-Dubay versus HwTears)? Though my colleague Nan Barchowsky has passed on, her work is continued by her son Damien (whom she taught to write), still at BFHhandwriting.com — Similarly, though the founders of Getty-Dubay (Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay) remain very much alive, their business is now run by Jonathan Dubay (the son of Inga Dubay), whom Inga similarly taught to write. (I wonder what has been the experience of other, conventional print-then-cursive companies, such as HwTears, with the second generation: as far as you know, do any of the children follow the founders?)
Thanks, Dite, for your commitment to experimenting! I hope you’ll contact the developers of either (or both) programs, work through them, learn the ins and outs of each, and keep us posted! If you would like the direct e-mail addresses and/or phone-numbers of the program-designers (Nam Barchowsky, Barbara Getty, and Inga Dubay), drop me an e-mail at handwritingrepair@gmail.com …