Melody Eichbauer grew up learning cursive in grade school and scribbling exam answers until her hand cramped well into her college years.
Eichbauer, a professor of medieval, legal and ecclesiastical history at Florida Gulf Coast University, often combs through legal texts, where connected letters characterize the court records of the Middle Ages. But as she turns to her students, a lack of handwritten notes is a cause for concern.
When she gave her students a handwritten exam a few years back, she brought hand massagers to class to minimize the pain. “What I noticed was that the students who wrote in cursive actually had more detailed essays than those in print,” Eichbauer said.
Cursive writing will be a revived practice after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an amended teacher training and mentoring bill into law, which requires cursive instruction for Florida students in grades three through five.
Rep. Tobin Overdorf, R-Stuart, initially drafted a cursive instruction bill, which called for students to develop their cursive writing skills with legible letter formation and proper spacing and alignment while writing in complete sentences for grades two through five.
But after sitting with no movement in the House and the Senate until the second-to-last day of the legislative session, the bill was added as an amendment to a proposal by Sen. Shevrin Jones’, D-Miami Gardens.
Jones’ bill established a new school teacher training and mentoring program to improve student success across the state. The amendment changed the grade requirement in the updated language. DeSantis signed the bill last week.
Overdorf felt compelled to combat a lack of John Hancocks after listening to stories with mortgage professionals in his district who were shocked when younger generations of Floridians couldn’t sign legal documents because they didn’t know cursive.
“There's a writing requirement, an essay writing requirement, but it can be done on typing or print,” Overdorf said. “So why not make it cursive writing instead and still get the same type of requirement done?”
By fifth grade, students must be able to read a sample of cursive writing and write sentences in proper cases. Overdorf hopes evaluations will help support students’ literacy development, which will carry into their high school and college educations.
“What we found is that cursive writing actually helps a lot with sentence development, with comprehension, with hand-eye coordination, with early onset diagnoses of dyslexia and other learning disabilities,” he said.
It will be up to the Department of Education to decide how to assist students with developmental delays, who will also need to reach the benchmarks, he said.
“I look forward to the day when great penmanship is something that returns to the state of Florida,” Overdorf said.
He admits he began improving his own penmanship when he decided to draft the bill-turned-amendment.
Dora Escobedo, 49, taught in primary school for 18 years, shuffling between second, third, fourth and fifth grades. Now a public librarian, she recalls how limited cursive instruction felt in her years teaching.
“We would dedicate approximately 15 to 20 minutes to cursive instruction,” Escobedo said. “We had a book where we would start with slanting lines, circles, just the basic hand motion, movement of the cursive handwriting.”
Escobedo taught in Hendry County, where third graders had a reading proficiency score of 39.8% in 2023. While the legislature champions cursive as a source of literacy development, she believes that current writing standards are already too advanced for young students, who are required to use citations in writing responses by 9 years old, something she feels should be reserved for older students.
Teaching cursive was reserved for her fourth-grade students because in other grades, teachers had to prioritize meeting more pressing writing standards.
“Literacy and spelling go together, whether it be print, whether it be cursive,” she said. “Any kind of different experience and practice that students get with letter formation, spelling, phonics is definitely a plus in helping literacy skills.”
Valerie Weil, a handwriting examiner, is a strong believer in putting pen to paper. She describes handwriting like someone’s footprint. Two people can wear the same shoes, but their prints will bear different characteristics, such as width or whether they drag their heels or not. Handwriting reveals similar patterns. She believes physical writing needs to be revived.
“Writing helps you to connect ideas,” Weil said. “Connected Writing helps you to connect to other people. It helps you to formulate additional questions.”
Weil, a certified cursive coach, said cursive happens to be three times faster than writing in print. To truly encourage proficiency, teachers should spend 10 minutes a day on cursive instruction. They can require reports to be written in cursive or practice spelling words with looping letters. Proficiency isn’t difficult to measure, she added. As long as it’s legible, the letters aren’t dragged down and tangled, students should be able to pass the evaluation with flying colors.
She recommends students feed their curiosity and turn to original documents in their cursive script to know exactly where their history comes from. By finding new ways to establish a handwriting discipline, they can find better ways to encourage self-expression away from a screen.
“Teach them while they're young,” she says. “Teach them that self-discipline and let them know that they can do this.”
Eichbauer is tempted to have her students rely on what’s old-fashioned as Artificial Intelligence runs rampant on college campuses. Students need to read more to write better, she said, and students need to write more to learn better.
“How are we going to study the past if we don’t understand the languages on top of how do we even read these documents in our hands?” Eichbauer said. “How am I going to read people’s letter collections now, sift through their inboxes?”
This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at deliasauer@freshtakeflorida.com.
