Listening to the car radio, I found out why cursive matters. As you may know, cursive had been phased out of many schools. Children are taught to keyboard instead. That’s a mistake.
Experiments have demonstrated that students in class taking notes in cursive do significantly better on tests than students typing notes onto a computer. The reason seems obvious. Writing down notes in cursive is much slower than typing notes into a computer. As I recall the cursive process from my days as a note taker, I had to process what I was hearing, leave out what wasn’t vital and shorten everything in order to keep up. I was engaged with the material. Fast typers can get a lecture down word for word. But they aren’t evaluating. A second edge develops when the student goes back to study her notes. The cursive student studies the significant parts (the rest being omitted).
Students typing notes on a computer have been asked to slow down and process, but so far they seem unable to do it.
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