As students go through their years of school, their handwriting goes from print, to cursive, to print again. During the middle years of elementary school, teachers teach their students to write in cursive, but they stop enforcing it when students reach middle school. Now that students are in high school, there are few people that still use it. Some believe that there is little to no use for it.

“Cursive is the equivalent of a dead language. It’s like Latin. We are taught what it is, but no one ever uses it anymore,” said senior Jacob Balzer.

Several students only use cursive when needed, like signatures.

“I only use cursive for my signature,” said freshman Drew Morley

Technology may have a part in it. In today’s generation, technology is a central part of people’s lives. Some believe that cursive writing may be declining because of technology.

“Unless you’re using cursive font on technology, most people use print because that’s the font that they’re all exposed to, so it motivates them to use print,” said sophomore Richelle Lumpkins.

But not everyone uses print for a majority of their writing. Senior Shayla Cochran uses cursive often and has made it a primary part of her writing.

“I write everything in cursive. The only time I won’t write in cursive is if I am directly asked to print,” said Cochran.

She goes on to say how she started cursive in the first place.

“The way I started writing in cursive is an interesting story,” said Cochran. “I was looking through my mom’s college notebooks and I saw that she wrote her notes in cursive. The day after that I began writing in cursive too and I’ve been doing it throughout high school.”

She adds that she doesn’t have a strong preference over whether or not students should use cursive and to write whatever is comfortable to them, but she does believe people should write their signatures in cursive.

Students of this generation and probably the years to come may not use cursive for much of anything or, as the years go by, use it at all. For most people, they don’t have a use for it and it’s not reinforced in schools enough.

“We never use it unless it is for our name, and nowadays it is hard to read because we never see it,” said junior Lieacha Cook.

15rarthur@usd489.com