Love Letters Are Written By a Machine: The Future of Cursive

by Anastasiya Kolesnichenko

The US state of Illinois has joined 14 other states that require penmanship classes by passing a law requiring school students to learn joined-up handwriting, overriding the governor’s veto. The law requires cursive instruction by fifth grade for Illinois students starting in the 2018–19 school year.

Teaching kids joined-up handwriting is no longer a requirement in most US schools, and some countries such as Finland have dropped the skill from the curriculum or made it optional. The usual argument is that the time investment could be used to teach modern skills such as typing instead. Why, then, do some — like the UK where all tests have to be handwritten — still insist on it in a digital age? Is there a benefit to hours spent painstakingly copying the joined alphabet?

“Cursive writing is a skill children will need throughout their lives,” Senate Assistant Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Democrat, responsible for the handwriting push, said in a Lightford statement. “You cannot write a check, sign legal documents, or even read our Constitution without an understanding of cursive writing.”

Jessica Freeman, 45, who lives in New York, where cursive education is welcomed, is a parent of two 8 and 14-year-old children. She said that joint-up writing was just a romantic idea, “an unnecessary tradition” and no more than a basic skill. “Schools should not require cursive mastery anymore. I think students would all benefit from learning the piano,” Freeman said, “but I don’t think schools should require all students take piano lessons.”

While some parents argue about the necessity of joined-up handwriting and question why the United States Constitution had been written in cursive in the first place, Joanna Dolgin, an English teacher at East Side Community School in New York, proposes handwriting.“In the age of the iPhone, cursive’s usefulness might seem dubious, particularly to younger generations,” Dolgin said. “However, the fact is, everyone still writes: grocery lists, medical prescriptions, even love letters are penned by hand.”

In 2016 researchers at University College London proved that even love letters can be written by a machine and have taught a computer to imitate anyone’s handwriting. They have created an algorithm that can take a sample of handwritten text, examine its qualities, and then write any text in the same style. The invention is secure from potential use by criminals to attempt to forge signatures. Researchers say that close examination with a microscope will still reveal what was written by a real human being and what was machine-generated.

Many young Finns will never receive a carefully penned love letter. In favor of keyboard skills, penmanship classes are no longer required in schools in Finland. The government of the country accepted that texting and typing skills are more important in the modern age.

Finnish scientists Anna Maria Feit, Daryl Weir, and Antti Oulasvirta conducted a How We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing study. They proved that human’s average typing speed is 41.4 words per minute with 92% accuracy no matter whether you took a typing course or use a self-taught strategy. “With just 5 fingers you can be as fast as somebody using all 10. You could type without looking at your fingers, even if you never learned the touch typing system,” the study concluded.

According to a computer software company Domo, between the end of 2011 and June 2017, global text usage grew from 395 to 660 billion messages per month. That is a growth of approximately 67%.

Diana DeSpain Schramer, an owner of Write Way Copyediting LLC “It’s All How You Say It,” said “But texting, no matter how well written, is not writing. Texting is the 21st century’s version of the Morse code, albeit with letters, intended to convey information as quickly and sometimes as secretly as possible.”

Pens and keyboards bring into play very different cognitive processes: has been decided during the Tactile Reading Conference in Stockholm in 2017. “Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills — feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought,” said Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva. “Operating a keyboard is not the same at all: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast,” said professor Gentaz.

Learning how to write takes longer, thats is why The Waldorf school in Silicon Valley, where employees of Google, Apple, Yahoo and the chief technology officer of eBay send their children to, shun the use of technology, and encourages students to learn through creative, hands-on tasks. There are more than 160 schools across the US that follow the same policy.

A study, conducted by the Heart of England Foundation NHS Trust, found an overuse of technology is preventing children’s finger muscles from developing, and they are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils correctly.

“Children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago,” said Sally Payne, the head pediatric occupational therapist at the foundation. Dr. Payne said that children coming into school were being given a pencil but were not able to hold it because they did not have the fundamental movement skills.

According to the study, encouraging children to play muscle-building games that include building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes instead of typing and playing computer games can potentially help children develop those underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil. “Unfortunately, the nature of play had changed, It is easier to give a child an iPad today,” said Payne.

According to a 2016 survey of more than 500 kindergarten — 5th-grade teachers, conducted by Learning Without Tears organization, writing on paper happens during a major part of the elementary school day. It showed that whether it’s completing worksheets, journaling, or taking notes and written exams, handwriting plays a significant role in today’s classrooms. In fact, handwritten work increases as students progress through elementary grades. Technology lessons currently occur during 20 percent of instruction time. Therefore, handwriting and technology work together in the classroom to create an engaged, balanced, and successful learning environment.

The benefits of handwriting have been studied throughout history. The Dixon Ticonderoga Company, an office, and art supplies make, states that practicing handwriting improves the neural connections in the brain by activating large areas involved in thinking, language, and memory.

In 2012 a study The effects of handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate children by Karin H. James showed that it’s possible — but not proven — that the physical act of writing — and not typing- might help children learn to read.

Later research from Dr. James suggested that learning joined letters by watching someone else write them — rather than doing it for yourself — does not provide the same benefit.

A 2014 study from UCLA, titled The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard, found that writing by hand retains its benefits for memorization long beyond early childhood development. It tested students by asking them to take notes from a lecture, using either a laptop or a pen and paper, and then tested their recall on both facts and deeper conceptual questions. Essentially, the study found that students taking long-form notes on pen and paper tended to process the information on a deeper level.

“When somebody’s telling you something and you’re writing it down by hand, you put it in your own words,” said Joanna Dolgin, an English teacher at East Side Community School.

“Cursive writing was supposed to be dead by now,” disagreed Tom, 16, one of Dolgin’s students. He said that “the memorization rule” did not apply to him and that he preferred typing all the time.

With many hours of classroom time spent on traditional cursive writing, the benefits, some argue, may not be worth it. Bad handwriting leads to poorer test scores: proved US-based Carnegie Foundation in its Informing Writing study. Moreover, typing is beneficial to students with dyslexia: it may help them increase exam grades, according to the British Dyslexia Association.

The average typing speed is 41.4 words per minute, however, the average speed of writing is 13 wpm (with the range from a minimum of 26 to a maximum of 113 letters per minute (approximately 5 to 20 wpm), according to Dave Bledsoe’s Handwriting in an Adult Population study. Currently, the fastest English language typist is Barbara Blackburn, who reached a peak typing speed of 212 words per minute during a test in 2005, using a Dvorak simplified keyboard.

While victorious Illinois senators claimed that writing skill was essential, the reality is that many adults no longer write much by hand. A 2012 survey of 2,000 adults by UK mailing firm Docmail found that on average, it had been 41 days since respondents wrote — and that two-thirds of them only wrote short notes like shopping lists.

The Harvard Business Review points out that as much as 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions. According to International Institute of Graphology, based in India, Handwriting Analysis (Graphology) is used as a tool for assessing the right candidate for a job position. Graphology can give an accurate indication of a person’s personality structure, their abilities, ability to grow and develop, and their integrity. Businesses in European countries commonly use handwriting analysis in their employment practices. In France and Switzerland, approximately 80 percent of the large corporations use graphology in their hiring procedures. In America, an estimated 5,000 corporations use handwriting analysis in a variety of ways, including employment procedures and team-building.

“Psychometric tests are fine, but they can be manipulated, as people can change their answers depending on what they think the company wants to hear,” said Sandip Arsude, a handwriting analysis and graphology expert, founder of International Institute of Graphology. “Handwriting is impossible to fake, as opposed to CVs, which tend to be increasingly ‘embroidered’. A person might be able to fool me for a few lines, but their true style will show pretty quickly — particularly if they’re writing about something they’re interested in.”

For those with less than a perfect script, this may certainly raise concerns when applying for jobs that call for a letter “in own handwriting”. In fact, professional graphologists agree that bad handwriting is not a sign of sloppy work or a lazy attitude to employment — it can frequently mean a high degree of intelligence and enthusiasm.

Speaking of some other benefits of cursive writing in older ages, some physicians say joint-up handwriting could be a good stress relief and cognitive exercise for adults working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

“Some patients bring in journals from the years, and you can see a dramatic change from when they were 55 and doing fine and now at 70,” said Murali Doraiswamy, a neuroscientist at Duke University, in his the Wall Street Journal interview. “As more people lose writing skills and migrate to the computer, retraining people in handwriting skills could be a useful cognitive exercise.

Studies suggest that there is real value in learning and maintaining the ancient skill — joint-up writing — even as people increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards. However, living in a digital world, it is hard to tell what the future holds: a newly typed Constitution or a comeback of love letters.