Get the newsletter 💡
Breakthroughs and DIY tips six days a week.
Email address [Subscribe]
By signing up, you confirm 16+, agree to terms, accept cookies. Unsubscribe anytime.
Cursive is back. States and provinces are re-adding the flowing script to curriculums. The arguments? Thin.
Good reasons exist to teach it, sure. But the popular ones are lies. People swear it’s faster. They claim it boosts your brain more than print. They insist the law demands it for signatures.
Wrong. All of it.
Here is what science and the legal code actually say.
Speed is not the advantage
You hear it constantly: cursive writes faster.
Science disagrees. I looked. A single study confirming the speed myth doesn’t exist. Interesting finds? Yes.
A 1998 trial from Maryland and Washington found zero speed difference. A weird caveat: mixed-style writing—parts cursive, parts print—was both faster and clearer.
But here is the real kicker.
France teaches only cursive. Quebec teaches both. A 2013 look at this natural experiment found Quebec kids wrote faster. Their mess? Higher. Legibility? Lower.
So why?
Researchers don’t speculate. I do.
It’s the pen.
“Fountain pens want to connect,” wrote Josh Giesbrecht in 2015. “Ballpoint pens… need to be pushed into the paper.”
Fountain ink flows. It loves a line. Ballpoints fight you. They drag. Cursive on a ballpoint is friction.
Brain boosts? A myth.
Handwriting helps memory. We know that. Notes on paper fire different neural pathways than typing. It sticks better. Good reason for pen and paper.
Does the style matter?
No.
The argument that cursive specifically wires your brain better than print lacks evidence. None.
Jim Hewitt and Nidhi Sach from Toronto reviewed everything. Their verdict was blunt: no advantages for cursive over print. Or vice versa.
Another 2012 Toronto review echoed this. Handwriting beats typing for learning. Which type of handwriting?
“We cannot yet say,” they wrote. “Whether both are necessary is… questionable.”
The tool matters. The loop? Irrelevant.
Legal signatures
The final myth: you must sign in cursive or the law voids it.
Kids need this for adulthood, they say.
False.
The Uniform Commercial Code in the US sets the standard. A signature can be “a word, mark,或 symbol.”
Print is fine. An ‘X’ works. Any mark, so long as it proves you did it with intent.
I hunted for any country requiring cursive signatures.
Couldn’t find one.
Printed names bind contracts globally.
So why teach the loops? Maybe tradition. Maybe nostalgia. But it certainly isn’t for speed, brains, or the law.
Why bother then?
I’m not sure. The evidence doesn’t support the rush.
