The Print vs Cursive Showdown!

[TL;DR: Choose either print or cursive when teaching handwriting, and stick with it.]

Get ready for everything you assumed about handwriting to be rewritten (pun intended).

In this discussion, I’m using “print” to refer to non-joined/non-cursive/manuscript handwriting, and “cursive” to specifically refer to joined handwriting. There are options in-between the two as well (partial print, partial cursive); I’ll refer to those as “mixed.”

I’m going to start with the uncontroversial (based on the research and evidence at least): Handwriting matters. It’s not just useful in itself, it’s beneficial for other literacy skills (such as reading and spelling), and getting handwriting right reduces cognitive load for composition purposes (even at the note-taking stage). The early literacy benefits of handwriting are not replaced by the ability to type: handwriting is especially important in the first three years of school, though typing skills are also important thereafter – it’s not an “either/or,” they are both good, but handwriting has primacy.

Now the solid ground under our feet is going to turn to shifting sand. I set out to get a clear answer on whether we should teach print, or cursive, and in what order if we should teach both. I failed. Kind of. But have a read anyway, this stuff is fascinatingly counter-intuitive and I do have some practical conclusions for you.

In my reading, I frequently came across statements about cursive and print that seemed so obvious they didn’t need any research to back them up, and people frequently didn’t bother to refer to any such research either. Why would you, when it’s so obviously right (for example) that cursive is faster than print…? Sometimes the writer would refer to research, and I’d dutifully click through to read it, only to find it said no such thing. For example, someone would claim cursive is better than print on some measure, but you click through and the supporting study didn’t even consider print, it just looked at cursive versus typing. Sometimes the linked study would be a single study from the 1970’s that looked at 48 children, that doesn’t match the many much larger studies done since, or a study from the 1930’s similarly out-of-step with more recent cumulative findings. People were being extremely selective with their supporting research, if they bothered to offer it up at all. It wasn’t a good start. I soon found pieces from experts in the field that had expressed the same frustration, one example of which I’ll elaborate on below. For now, be forewarned that this area is messy, with contradictory claims and evidence, but being aware of this is valuable too: it’s no good strongly pushing for a different approach to handwriting if the existing one is just as good.

Letter formation: Both cursive and print contain difficult hand movements, such as wave patterns, diagonals, and clockwise movements. The lines formed during print are generally easier to make and more straightforward, but print does require the hand to come off the page more than cursive, both in the formation of letters and between letters, which then includes the hand having to make more little shifts. There is no clear outright winner between the print and cursive for ease of letter formation; both have benefits and draw-backs.

Cursive emphasises the gaps between words, so children don’t have to work so hard at getting gap size right between letters themselves versus between words. However, if you’re thinking of going to cursive because a child is struggling with gaps, letter height, position on the line etc. (as commonly associated with dyslexia and dysgraphia), the research does not actually support this as a remedial option (as will be discussed in more detail below).

Letter recognition: Traditionally, we start with print. One rationale for this is that the letters are those they’ll see in books and during other aspects of literacy instruction, so letters will be more easily recognised and recreated, but this expected benefit isn’t universally supported by the research. Letter recognition is not necessarily enhanced by teaching children to use print: Children who have learned cursive learn to identify print letters fine (surprisingly), but those who learn print find it hard to recognise cursive; this could then argue towards starting out with cursive. However, it is quicker and easier to learn how to read cursive (typically less than an hour) than it is to learn how to write cursive: teaching specifically how to read cursive may be the better option than going all-in on cursive instruction. Some research does support that children who are taught print (or a mixed print-cursive technique) have better “letter knowledge” (knowing letter shapes, names, and sounds) than those taught only cursive. Again though, the research doesn’t support a clear winner for the issue of letter recognition.

Legibility: Print is considered to be more legible than cursive. The ability to print is considered crucial because of its clarity; many documents require people to print for this reason, even in societies where learning cursive is the norm. However, even here there has been research that found children taught only cursive have more legible handwriting than those taught only print. So, for the issue of legibility, the preference is also not clear cut.

Speed: Speed is correlated with getting down ideas better; it matters. Despite the common assumption, cursive is not automatically faster than print, in fact print is faster for many children and many studies do show print to be faster in general.

I’m going to expand on this a little with a particular example of things going wrong in this area of understanding, because it’s illustrative of how assumptions get made and reinforced and not revisited. On the popular International Dyslexia Association website, they state that cursive is faster (as part of a piece supporting cursive for dyslexic children). The only reference given is one where a handwriting expert (Kate Gladstone) is quoted in a 2005 story as estimating cursive is faster. That same expert openly stated in 2021, that research has shown this is not the case: “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.” Gladstone goes on to point out that cursive has not been shown to be a better option for people with dyslexia – and yet she is the key citation, on a dyslexia page, for a “fact” used to support cursive with dyslexics. She has also expressed displeasure at the misquoting and misrepresentation of studies by many people who push the benefits of cursive.

Back on task:

The fastest handwriting option is a mix, where some letters are joined and some aren’t. For many adults (approximately 55%) their writing evolves into this mixed format – have a look the next time you’re making quick notes and you may notice this mash together of styles. Even teachers’ handwriting frequently falls into this category, and yet the same teachers will insist on teaching children a format they themselves abandoned in preference of a mixed style.

For speed then, the order appears to go (from fastest to slowest): mixed, print, cursive. Therefore, if you’re choosing between the two main options, print looks like the winner under this heading. (Yay, we finally have a winner in a category, but it’s not the one you were expecting, is it.)

(One more interesting point related to speed but in a different sense: Learning to form and master letters appears to be quicker when using print than cursive as the initial teaching style. Getting this skill to the point of automaticity is important, so this is a noteworthy “tick” in the print column over cursive as well.)

Spelling: Even though a mixed style is the fastest option, it is also associated with making more spelling errors. I sought out research to back up the popular claim that cursive makes spelling better; mostly people simply reasoned that it must do because the words are written more clearly as whole units (because of the joining). That reasoning sounds plausible but it also sounded plausible that cursive was faster than print, and we know where that ended up. In one piece that the author bothered to supply a citation for the claim that cursive improved spelling, the conclusion of the study they linked to was as follows:

“When we take the handwriting style into account, we can observe that Manuscript/cursive [mixed] style children do not perform as well in spelling as the children in the other groups. This finding lends support to the idea that the development of writing skills in primary school is better served by teaching a single handwriting style (cursive or manuscript) to avoid dual learning.”

Which is to say, it did not conclude that teaching cursive led to better spelling outcomes than teaching children to use print; it supported choosing one style and sticking with it.

A 2022 article summarising the literature on cursive versus print over the previous decade, reached the conclusion that cursive appears to be advantageous for spelling, and I have seen that study used by others to support the teaching of cursive following the initial teaching of print in order to access this cursive spelling benefit. But a key study relied on there was comparing cursive to moving from print to cursive. In that scenario, cursive was the better option, so it would be a mistake to use that study to support the teaching of cursive after teaching print, or even cursive over print – rather, it supports not shifting between two styles. As with so many studies in this area, you need to look up what was actually being compared to what, rather than pulling a single sentence out of context.

In a 2009 study, researchers attempted to use cursive as a spelling intervention for struggling students. It was not an effective intervention, and they concluded that it is better to work on phonological strategies (letter-sound correspondences) than handwriting to remediate spelling challenges.

My key takeaway from the literature on this topic was that using a single style (either cursive or print) was better than shifting from one style to another. There appears to be no particular “winner” in the category of spelling (or certainly, no unambiguous winner); using either is better than using both.

Order: There are a lot of assumptions about the best order, especially with people thinking cursive is the more evolved (and quicker) form of writing and therefore the end-point that people need to achieve. The research does not support this presumption. You could teach cursive first before print, in fact moving from cursive to print is easier than moving from print to cursive. If you are planning to definitely teach cursive, it should be taught first and alone, to avoid teaching new formation and hand movements to the child. You could choose not to teach cursive at all; it’s far more important that people have one firm personal style than that it’s identifiable as print or cursive.

I’d assumed that if one was to move from print to cursive that it would be best to use a transition style – one that starts to use slants and flicks and gently evolves towards using joins. Turns out that presumption is also false: using a transition style does not help, which starts to make sense if you realise that you are now teaching the child multiple (at least three) handwriting styles when the research strongly supports having one strong one. Even starting with a slanted style when teaching print, doesn’t make it easier to later learn cursive. In fact, and surprisingly, there is a low correlation between the ability to do print and the ability to do cursive! (Yes, I know, all this counterintuitive stuff is painful.)

Evidence leads towards choosing one style instead of two. Teaching a second style requires relearning how to form letters, and requiring children to use the new version increases the difficulty of composition again (putting more cognitive load back into writing itself, taking away the automaticity of having a handwriting style). At the stage we typically expect children to change their handwriting to another style, we have also built an expectation that they are no longer using so much mental energy to simply form letters; we’ve then upped the difficulty of the task, which may be defensible if it genuinely and clearly led to benefits for the child to have learned a second style, when this is not clearly the case.

Other benefits: Some studies have found extra benefits from learning cursive compared to print, such as for fine motor skills and broader cognitive benefits, but these benefits are not consistently found – there are conflicting findings in the research on this issue and there is certainly a lack of consensus. Some studies have found no difference in the brain at all between the two writing styles, where others claim there is. The strongest benefits of handwriting as a task are found for both print and for cursive; if there are extra benefits in cursive, they appear to be minor by comparison. Again, the most important (and well-established) thing here is that there are definite benefits to the act of handwriting itself.

Children with dyslexia/dysgraphia: 5% to 27% of children, mostly boys, struggle with handwriting. Often people suggest changing the handwriting style (especially from print to cursive) to address this difficulty. However, dyslexic/dysgraphic children actually make the same errors in cursive as they do with print, that includes letter reversals, and spacing and letter-height issues. There is nothing automatically superior in cursive for these struggling children. Certainly, requiring students who struggle in handwriting to learn an additional handwriting form is a lot to ask of them; this “dual learning process” would have to impart significant benefits to overcome the additional challenges involved, and it’s certainly not clear that it does.

If there are severe writing problems, it may be easier to use print, as the movements are generally easier and have better stability, but the constant picking up and repositioning of the pen may make it harder too. Cursive may be harder for dysgraphics than printing, because they don’t just have to form each letter well, but need to consider the coming letter for the correct join between them.

Again, the overall message is there is no single clear winner between the two, but don’t make a child with learning disabilities learn both forms – that much is clear.

Winners table:

• Letter formation: Either

• Letter recognition: Either

• Legibility: Either

• Speed: Print

• Spelling: Either (but not both)

• Order: Either (but not both)

• Other benefits: Either (possibly cursive)

• Dyslexia/dysgraphia: Either (but not both)

That was fun, wasn’t it? I’ll wrap up what we can take away from all of this:

There is absolutely a lack of consensus on whether print or cursive is better overall, but there is consensus that handwriting itself is very important. The most important thing when choosing a style is to choose one and stick with it; don’t get caught up in the idea that cursive is the higher form of handwriting and must be taught. Regardless of the chosen style, the evidence does support the need for explicit handwriting instruction and heaps of practice. So, choose one style, teach it clearly, get the child to practice it a lot, and be wary of any claims that one style is absolutely superior to the other, the research does not support this broad claim at this stage.

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[This is an updated version of a post I wrote in January 2023 - I have added a couple of extra points along with links to supporting articles, but it’s otherwise substantially the same, and reaches the same conclusion as I did back then. New research keeps coming out on handwriting and many questions have been inadequately explored, so I’d encourage you to explore this topic for yourself too and to keep an open mind! This is one of those topics where people hold strong views without strong evidence; be prepared to question others as well as questioning your own assumptions.]

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Selected list of readings used towards writing this post (meaning I had to read a lot of unsubstantiated stuff to find a few genuine research-backed gems):

• “Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths” (Ball, 2016) https://nautil.us/cursive-handwriting-and-other-education-myths-236094/

• “Learning different allographs through handwriting: The impact on letter knowledge and reading acquisition” (Bara et al., 2016) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1041608015300236

• “Is Cursive Writing Important to Child Development?” (Dickinson, 2019) https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/cursive-important-child-development/

• “Handwriting Acquisition and Intervention: A Systematic Review” (Fancher et al., 2018) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328397510_Handwriting_Acquisition_and_Intervention_A_Systematic_Review

• “Learning to Write in Cursive Might Not Be as Important as Your Teachers Told You” (Ferro, 2016) https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/86963/learning-write-cursive-might-not-be-important-your-teachers-told-you

• “The Relationship Between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility” (Graham et al., 2010) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220679809597556

• “The Effects of Manuscript, Cursive or Manuscript/Cursive Styles on Writing Development in Grade 2” (Morin et al., 2012) https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/langandlit/index.php/langandlit/article/view/11028/13067

• “Does cursive handwriting have an impact on the reading and spelling performance of children with dyslexic dysgraphia: A quasi-experimental study” (Nalpon & Chia, 2009) https://journalofreadingandliteracy.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/jrl_vol1_no1_2009.pdf#page=66

• “Manuscript and/or Cursive: The Contribution of Research Conducted Since 2012 on Handwriting Instruction” (Pulido & Thériault, 2022) https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0209978#

• “Which to Choose: Manuscript or Cursive Handwriting? A Review of the Literature” (Schwellnus et al., 2012) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271936765_Which_to_Choose_Manuscript_or_Cursive_Handwriting_A_Review_of_the_Literature

• “Literacy – Handwriting” (Arc - webpage is currently being updated, I am including it because it was one of my original sources in 2023, and hopefully the updated page will be equally valuable) https://arc.educationapps.vic.gov.au/learning/sites/literacy/1786