I wrote last August about a visit I had from my old Roman motorcycling friend, Mike Cobbold, who now lives in Sacramento. I mentioned in my Roman Memories story that Mike has struggled with some physical limitations due to a combination of many years of Type 1 Diabetes, the connected autoimmune condition of Rheumatoid Arthritis, and some strokes… all possibly genetic or perhaps signs of a life lived hard and well in the wilderness. On the occasion of my recent stories about my minor struggle with my hand functionality and fine motor skills (a result of my “handlebar palsy” as I believe it to be), Mike sent me a link to a NYT article about how teenagers are thinking about using handwriting versus keyboarding in this digital age. The bottom line of the article was somewhat predictable because it was written by someone who grew up with more handwriting in their life and was also obviously a person “of letters” versus a tech bro. The references to the specialness of the handwritten note or card are well-trodden intergenerational commentary levied on the generations that grew up with keyboarding as their primary medium of communication. We’ve even gone further with the shift from QWERTY 10-finger keyboarding to smartphone thumb texting (first two-fisted, and now often one-handed). I like to think of myself as fairly progressive and up-to-date on things like this, but even I scratch my head when I hear people say that no one uses or even teaches cursive any more and block printing is as far as most kids ever get in their written word training.
Actually, the trend around cursive has reversed and it’s making a comeback, not disappearing. The story is that in 2010, the Common Core State Standards dropped cursive and added keyboarding instead, leaving handwriting as a local decision. That triggered a decade-long decline. But as of 2026, 27 states have now passed laws mandating cursive instruction in elementary and, in some cases, middle grades compared to just 14 states a decade ago. The drivers behind the comeback include a few things. States are concerned about stagnant reading and writing scores, and research points to handwriting’s positive impact on student learning. There’s also a fine motor skills problem: in a January 2026 survey of over 1,100 early educators, 70% said their students’ fine motor skills had decreased in the past two years — widely attributed to screen use. Not everyone is on board. Some experts argue there’s no evidence cursive provides cognitive benefits beyond regular printing, and critics call it a waste of classroom time when keyboards and voice-to-text are readily available. A practical wrinkle is that younger teachers were often never taught cursive themselves, so states mandating it are essentially asking teachers to learn it alongside their students. .. how crazy is that? It’s clear that this reversal after schools moved away from cursive about 15 years ago is being driven by a mix of nostalgia, concerns about fine motor development, and some (contested) research on cognitive benefits.
I have mixed feelings about this issue…and those feelings have recently been in flux even more than normal due to my current hand dysfunctions. In general, I am a big believer in the notion that slowing down while writing is a meaningful cognitive adjustment and tends to change the structure and output. and mostly there is some benefit to handwriting versus keyboarding. I think the differential is even more acute between keyboarding and dictation, which I use with my iPhone when I don’t have my iPad handy. With time, I’ve learned how to write in my usual style via dictation but I won’t swear it’s exactly the same. The good part of it is that it forces me to edit more and better…just like autocorrect with the keyboard forces more editing and better output than with handwriting. Spellcheck alone adds value that handwriting doesn’t benefit from.
Now with my hand problems (fine motor skill numbness and weakness due to that “handlebar palsy”) I find two things…first, keyboarding is a recommended exercise and seems to especially help the pinky and ring finger (not so much the thumb since the right thumb can handle the spacebar without the left thumb)…and secondly, even though my right hand is far less impacted by this palsy, when I have written by hand it feels distinctly weird now and I have definitely lost some control of my handwriting. I can still write OK, but it’s more “wobbly” and less well-controlled. I wouldn’t want to be a calligrapher at this point. I can’t completely explain how this makes me feel. My hand dysfunction is very frustrating when it comes to simple tasks like buttoning a shirt or my pants, and putting on my compression socks (tough sometimes even with two good hands). Today Kim and and I went to the movies and I discovered that juggling a large soda cup, filling it with my soda selection, putting on a plastic lid, taking a straw out of its wrapper, putting the straw in the cup through the plastic lid, and then carrying the full cup in one hand and the cardboard box with my share of the popcorn into the theater, but not before stopping to open up some little salt packets to put on the popcorn and remembering to take some napkins out of the dispenser. Why do I bother listing such mundane and simple tasks? Because nothing is mundane and simple when your fine motor skills are compromised. But as much as that bothers me, it doesn’t concern me because I assume I’ve injured myself and can find my way back through OT and hand exercises (I’ve seen some small improvement in a week). What does bother me is thinking about it impairing my ability to communicate through the written word. (be it keyboarding or handwriting).
I know old motorcycling buddy Mike struggles to write with his neuropathy. I remember watching my friend Andy have a TIA (strangely enough, at the end of a long motorcycle trip through Croatia) that caused him to lose his ability to write AND speak. Two main regions of the brain handle speech and writing. Speech production comes from Broca’s area, in the left frontal lobe, which controls the motor planning of spoken language, forming words and constructing grammar. Damage causes Broca’s aphasia: halting, effortful speech with intact comprehension. Writing draws on several areas working together: the angular gyrus (integrating visual and language information), the motor cortex (hand movement), and Broca’s area again for language formulation. The cerebellum and basal ganglia also contribute to the fine motor coordination writing requires. Dysfunction can arise even when these brain areas are undamaged. There are structural/connectivity issues such as damage to the arcuate fasciculus (the white matter tract connecting the speech areas) that causes conduction aphasia, disconnection syndromes where intact regions can’t communicate properly and subcortical lesions (thalamus, basal ganglia, internal capsule) that can disrupt speech fluency and writing without cortical damage. Then there are motor system problems like dysarthria ( where muscles of speech (lips, tongue, larynx) work poorly due to ALS, Parkinson’s, MS, or stroke affecting motor pathways), apraxia of speech (where the brain can’t properly sequence the motor movements for speech, even though muscles are fine) and essential tremor or dystonia (which disrupts the fine motor control needed for writing… like writer’s cramp).
I am doing my best to think horses, not zebras, as they say in medicine. I’m keyboarding every day and getting back to 95+% at that. There’s nothing wrong with my speech. But today I had to put together a new bench for Kim. The little allen wrench to do that for the 16 screws was workable for me, but it took me twice as long as it might have a month ago. I can live with that, but if it starts to affect my communicating over time…its gonna leave more than 16 screws loose in my head.