Penmanship is being dropped from the curricula of many U.S. public schools as the Common Core standards, which omit penmanship, have now been adopted by the vast majority of states, according to an August 2011 report in the New Yorker.

Those opposed to the teaching of penmanship in schools have argued that digital communication skills (i.e. typing) are the skills that children will need to succeed and that those should be taught instead.

“If you just stop and think for a second about what are the sorts of skills that people are likely to be using in the future, it’s much more likely that keyboarding will help students succeed in careers and in school than it is that cursive will,” Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor of K-12 policy and leadership at the University of Southern California, was quoted as saying in a Nov. 14, 2013 Associated Press report.

While there certainly is a need for typing to be taught to students, those arguing for the removal of penmanship from the curricula of U.S. public schools have put forward a false-choice fallacy.

It’s not a question of whether one should be taught over the other;  both penmanship and typing are skills that complement each other and deserve to be given time and attention that doesn’t come at the expense of the other.

Throughout most of my schooling, my handwriting has always been terrible.   I was constantly scolded for my illegible writing. And years of constant computer use did my handwriting no favors.

It wasn’t until relatively recently (by this time, my handwriting had become a heinous scrawl) that I had decided to make an effort to improve it.

 It was throughout that time, practicing letters one by one till they were something I was satisfied with, did I begin to see what value lied in having good penmanship.

Writing by hand causes one to slow down and think more about each word being written.

And the benefits have been shown in studies as well: In the study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology, researchers found that elementary school students who wrote by hand wrote more, faster and wrote more complete sentences.

Modern cognitive research has also demonstrated the benefits that minds, young and old alike, gain when they emphasize handwriting. An October 2010 Wall Street Journal report detailed various studies in which cursive was shown to help children with reading comprehension as well as expressing themselves.

Neuroscientist Karin Harman James conducted research which demonstrated the various ways in which learning letters affect the brains of children while they were writing by hand and typing, according to a January 2012 Indiana University press release.

Writing by hand, her research showed, engaged more areas of the brain and substantially improved letter recognition – a key prerequisite and predictor of future reading skills, according to a June 2011 article in the Chicago Tribune.

However, the educational benefits are only part of the value of teaching penmanship.

Being that writing in longhand has traditionally been what marked the literate from illiterate, much of our cultural heritage is in archived handwritten documents.

The original forms of documents like the United States Constitution and the journals of ancestors will be unreadable to children who weren’t taught cursive.

By viewing penmanship as antiquated and anachronistic skill, we not only are disregarding an important part of our collective cultural heritage, we are also denying young children the cognitive and educational benefits that penmanship offers them.