Italic is making a comeback. North American states and provinces are reintroducing the continuous form of handwriting, making all sorts of arguments about why.

There are good arguments for teaching cursive, of course, but some of the most common ones don’t stand up to scrutiny. People will confidently affirm the idea that cursive is faster, that it offers cognitive benefits over handwriting, and that signatures must legally be in cursive. The problem: none of that is true. Let’s delve into what the science and law really suggest.

Cursive is not faster than handwriting.

A common idea is that cursive is faster than printing, but scientific research does not confirm this. I couldn’t find a single study that suggests cursive is faster, although I did find some interesting ones.

A 1998 study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Washington found no speed differences between students writing in cursive and handwriting. However, there is a strange caveat: students who combined elements of each were faster and more readable.

But the most interesting thing is a natural experiment. Schools in France teach all students to write exclusively in cursive, while schools in Quebec teach both cursive and handwriting. A 2013 study by researchers at the University of Brest and the University of Sherbrooke found that children in Quebec wrote faster, although their handwriting was less legible. Cursive writing was found to be slower than handwriting.

So why is this? The researchers in both studies don’t speculate, but I have a personal guess: The pens are to blame. A 2015 article in The Atlantic by Professor Josh Giesbrecht describes how cursive is a natural choice for fountain pens, where the continuous flow makes the connection of letters natural. “Fountain pens want To connect letters,” he writes, “you have to convince the pens to write, you have to push them against the paper instead of just touching it.”

But the research does not clarify this; it just shows that cursive isn’t actually faster than handwriting.

Cursive has no magical educational benefits

I’ve written in the past about how writing by hand is better for remembering things and there’s all kinds of research to back this up. Taking notes on paper activates a different part of the brain than writing, and that seems to be related to learning. It is a good reason for children to learn to write with a pen.

But that’s an argument in favor of writing with pencil and paper, not any particular style. There is a common argument that writing in cursive has cognitive benefits compared to handwriting, but I couldn’t find a single study that proves this. Neither did Jim Hewitt and Nidhi Sachdeva, two education researchers at the University of Toronto. They exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and came to a clear conclusion: “Our literature review found no evidence of advantages for cursive writing,” they wrote. “We think it is unlikely that cursive offers more cognitive benefits than print, or vice versa.”

Similarly, a 2012 research review, also conducted by Toronto-based researchers, found no clear evidence that one form of writing is superior to the other. “We cannot yet definitively say whether cursive or handwriting is better for children when they first learn to write,” the article concludes, adding that “it is also questionable whether both are necessary.” The article claims that handwriting has clear learning benefits about typing, it’s just that the way you write doesn’t matter.

Signatures do not have to be in italics.

A common myth is that children need to learn cursive because only cursive signatures are legally binding. There is no truth in this. According to the Uniform Commercial Code, a U.S. law that establishes various standards for trade and commerce in the United States, a signature can be “a word, mark, or symbol executed or adopted by a person with the actual intent of authenticating a writing.” In other words: a printed signature is fine. The same goes for any type of symbol, as long as you use it consistently with the intention of demonstrating your identity.

I tried to find any example of a country, anywhere, that specifically required italics for signatures; I couldn’t find any. Printed signatures are legally enforceable almost everywhere.

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