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October 11, 2006 10:38 AM

The death of cursive

Posted by Kim Peterson

Did the computer keyboard kill cursive handwriting? This Washington Post story reports that children are taught keyboarding at an early age and that cursive has fallen out of favor.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

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