Print or Cursive First? What the Research Says

Teach unjoined print first, then add joins once letter shapes are secure. That is what the better evidence supports, though it supports it more weakly than either side of this argument usually admits, and the strongest reason is not the one you normally hear. The clearest finding in the field is that the fastest, most legible older writers use neither pure print nor pure cursive but a mixture of the two, which reframes the question from “which script” to “what order, and how much of a switch.”

What the research actually supports

Teaching handwriting at all matters more than the script you pick

Before arguing about script, it is worth knowing the size of the prize. The largest synthesis available is Santangelo and Graham’s meta-analysis of true and quasi-experimental handwriting interventions with K to 12 students. Compared with no handwriting instruction or with non-handwriting instruction, teaching handwriting produced greater legibility (effect size 0.59) and greater fluency (effect size 0.63). It also improved children’s actual writing: quality 0.84, length 1.33, writing fluency 0.48 (Santangelo and Graham, Educational Psychology Review, 2016).

Two things stand out. The gains on composition are larger than the gains on handwriting itself, which is the practical argument for spending time on this at all. And pure motor training, the fine motor exercises often sold as handwriting readiness, produced effectively nothing (0.10 for legibility, negative 0.07 for fluency). Letters, not squiggles. That finding is doing a lot of work in our step by step teaching guide.

Mature handwriting is mixed, and mixed is fastest

Graham, Weintraub and Berninger analyzed three writing samples (narrative, expository and copying) from 600 students in grades 4 through 9. Students who used a combination of manuscript and cursive letters were the most fluent writers, and mixed-letter papers generally received higher legibility ratings than either pure script (The Journal of Educational Research, 1998).

This is the single most useful result for a parent or teacher, and it is routinely misquoted in both directions. It does not show that cursive is bad. It shows that the naturally efficient adult hand is a print skeleton with the easy joins added, and that children drift toward it on their own. If that is the destination, then teaching clean unjoined letterforms first is teaching the part that survives.

Caveat worth stating: those students were overwhelmingly taught manuscript first, so the study describes what happens under a print-first regime rather than proving print-first is superior to a cursive-first alternative that was never tested.

Mastering one format before switching beat an early switch

Wolf, Abbott and Berninger ran the sequencing question directly. In their second study, one group of second graders received a second year of manuscript instruction while another was introduced to cursive in second grade. Those who got a second year of manuscript improved more on sustained handwriting, measured over 30, 60 and 90 second intervals. Both groups improved in spelling and composing. The authors framed the conclusion as mastering one handwriting format before introducing another at a higher grade level (Reading and Writing, 2017).

Sample sizes were small (29 and 24), and the instruction was embedded in one specific literacy program, so treat this as one good study rather than a settled matter.

Delaying cursive helped reading, in Hebrew

A 2026 study assigned first grade classrooms to either manuscript throughout the year with cursive introduced only in the final two months, or manuscript and cursive taught in parallel from the start. Across 102 children, the manuscript-first group scored higher on all end-of-year reading measures, including comprehension, for both typical and at-risk readers (Vaknin-Nusbaum and Lahav, Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 2026).

Read this one carefully before you deploy it. Hebrew print and Hebrew cursive are two visually distinct alphabets rather than two styles of the same shapes, so the cost of learning both at once is higher than in English. The finding is suggestive for the general principle of not splitting a beginner’s attention across two letter sets. It is not direct evidence about English cursive.

The UK argument, which is more honest than the US one

Britain has had this fight in the open, and the National Handwriting Association has taken a public position against continuous cursive, the style where every lowercase letter begins with a lead-in stroke from the baseline.

Angela Webb, a former NHA chair, argues that lead-in strokes impose motor demands many five year olds do not have, and that a baseline entry programmed as a habit distorts letters that should begin at mid-height, such as those following an o or an r. On the case usually made for continuous cursive, she writes plainly: “There is no evidence to date to substantiate any of these claims” (Continuous Cursive: Cure or Curse?). Her recommendation is simple unadorned letterforms with flowing exit strokes, so joining develops without any motor pattern needing to be unlearned.

Pam Hulme makes the developmental case for Reception age children, noting that “there are no requirements to teach fully cursive writing either in the EYFS or in the National Curriculum” and that the right oblique stroke needed for entry strokes is still only emerging between ages four and five (Teaching Fully Cursive Writing in Reception).

The curriculum text backs them up. England’s national curriculum asks Year 1 pupils to “begin to form lower-case letters in the correct direction, starting and finishing in the right place,” with no joining at all. Joining appears in Year 2, and only “as soon as they can form letters securely with the correct orientation” (national curriculum in England, English programmes of study). The NHA’s own reading is blunter still: “The recent evidence is clear that a lead-in stroke should not be taught in handwriting” (Handwriting in the National Curriculum).

Where the evidence is genuinely thin

Cursive and dyslexia. The claim that cursive helps dyslexic writers is not baseless, but it is far narrower than the slogan. Arfé and colleagues compared manuscript and cursive across alphabet, copying and dictation tasks in 24 Italian children with dyslexia. They found that “orthographic complexity more than the visual-motor characteristics of the task” drove performance, with a cursive advantage appearing specifically in the dyslexia group and not in controls (Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2020). Italian is a shallow orthography and the sample is small. It is a reason to try cursive with a struggling writer, not a reason to start every child on it.

Cursive and letter reversals. Widely asserted, and no controlled test of it turned up during research in either direction. Treat it as unproven, and see b and d reversals for what does predict them.

Cursive is faster. Not supported as a blanket claim. The mixed style won on fluency in the 1998 study above.

Legislation is not evidence. Roughly 20 to 25 states now have a cursive requirement, depending on whether you count mandates alone or mandates plus encouragement, which is why published counts disagree so wildly. Pennsylvania Act 2 of 2026, which originated as House Bill 17, was signed on 11 February 2026 and took effect on 12 April 2026, requiring cursive instruction. A legislature deciding something does not make it a research finding. See is cursive still taught for how to check your own state.

What to do about it

Stage	Script	What you are actually training
Before letters	No letters yet	Vertical, horizontal, circle, cross, diagonal. See pre-writing strokes
First formal year	Unjoined print, no lead-in strokes	Correct start point and direction for each letter, one letter at a time
Second formal year	Same unjoined print, plus exit strokes	Consistent size and spacing, automaticity, sustained writing
Once letters are automatic	Add joins to the print skeleton	Diagonal and horizontal joins, and which pairs are better left unjoined
Later	Whatever mixture the child settles into	Speed and legibility together, not one at the other’s expense

Practical points that follow from the studies rather than from tradition:

Teach in formation-family order, not alphabetical order, so that letters sharing a motor pattern are learned together. That is a separate argument with its own article on teaching order, and it applies to both scripts.

Use the “letters secure first” test rather than a grade number. If a child still hesitates on start points, joining will bury the problem under a new motor demand instead of solving it. Our single letter pages exist for exactly this, one letter at a time, starting at letter a.

Choose exit strokes over entry strokes if you want an easy on-ramp to joining. An exit stroke is where the next join naturally begins, so nothing has to be unlearned. Entry strokes are the part the NHA objects to.

When you do introduce joins, introduce them as joins between letters the child already writes well, not as a new alphabet. Our cursive at home guide sequences it that way.

Generate your own practice at the size and trace weight your child needs in the worksheet generator. Our own styles are described functionally: traditional print, modern slant print, simplified block print and continuous cursive. If you are choosing between commercial curricula, Zaner-Bloser(R), D’Nealian(R) and Handwriting Without Tears(R) are registered trademarks of their respective owners, and this site is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a provider of any of them. We compare their design decisions editorially in comparing the main US handwriting styles.

The honest summary: print first is the better default and the burden of proof sits with cursive-first, but the effect sizes attached to script choice are small next to the effect size attached to teaching handwriting deliberately at all. A child taught continuous cursive well will beat a child taught print badly. Pick a sequence, teach it explicitly, keep the sessions short and frequent, and stop worrying about the script.