Has Technology Killed Cursive Handwriting?

There are good points made on both sides of this argument in this article. As the mother of a special needs child, cursive is not for everyone. While my son has learned cursive, he doesn’t prefer it, and his keyboarding skills are improving all the time. While I can write in cursive just fine, I find that I’m the opposite of the little girl in the story who won a cursive writing award. She felt that her creativity came out more with cursive. For me, that could be further from the truth, and I think it’s the same with my son. Because my keyboarding skills have gotten better and better over the years, I am able to express myself much better when using a keyboard, as my thoughts come out more quickly than if I was using any kind of handwriting. I find this to be true with my son. Additionally, as voice-activated technology gets better and better, that might even replace keyboarding as an option more and more. 

As one person in the article said, just because we don’t use Roman numerals all the time doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn math. Handwriting is all about interfaces, and technology changes those interfaces. I mean, if we didn’t have print letters, we’d be still be reading handwritten texts from the monasteries of medieval times, and we wouldn’t have the widespread global literacy rates that we have as compared to hundreds of years ago! Time will tell what impact current technology will have on literacy and creativity. 

–techcommgeekmom