Cursive Writing Persuasive Essay

Cursive writing is a form of penmanship that flows by joining letters together with loops so that the writing motion is continuous and therefore more efficient because the pen does not have to lift off the page as often. Although cursive has been the primary method of writing for centuries, it has been slowly disappearing over the last decade in our primary schools. According to the US Today, 41 states have removed cursive writing instruction from their mandatory curriculum (qtd. Tarshis 6). There is significant controversy currently within the educator community on whether or not to keep cursive alive by making it mandatory curriculum in primary education. The debate centers on the time required to learn cursive, which could be dedicated

Their argument is that, when society adds new skills and new knowledge to the list of things public schools need to teach, some other items have to come off the list. Otherwise, the curriculum becomes a mile wide and an inch deep, and cursive should be one skill that can be painlessly dropped to make way for new ones (“Cursive! Foiled Again?” 5). Steve Graham, an education professor at Arizona State University and one of the top U.S. experts on handwriting instruction, claims that today’s teachers value typing more than handwriting and that, by the 12th grade, half of all papers are composed on computers (Shapiro and Voisin 12-14). Graham views cursive instruction as teaching a second form of writing, for the sake of tradition, when only one form of writing will suffice (16). Many of today's young adults, even though they were taught cursive, have abandoned it in favor of printing because print is clearer and easier to read than script, and, for many, it is easier to write and just about as fast (“Cursive! Foiled Again?”