Most people remember being taught how to write cursive in elementary school, repeatedly tracing over dotted lines in the shape of the same letter over and over again. Some learned everything; some only got to the lower case letters; some didn’t even get through the entire alphabet. Cursive was a big part of the curriculum in elementary school, but there’s not as strong of an impact now.

These days, few teens write completely in cursive. But some can’t help but to incorporate a little into their normal handwriting.

“There’s times when I write and I get into cursive, then back to print,” sophomore Kendall Ramirez said. “It just depends.”

“My penmanship was not very good with cursive,” Librarian Amelia Bligh said. “So I taught myself a combination of print and cursive.”

Although people don’t usually write in cursive, it’s still useful. Without learning how all those years back, people wouldn’t be able to come up with a signature.

“I don’t use [cursive] in everyday life,” Ramirez said. “But cursive allows you to have a more personalized signature. It’s not easy to copy someone’s signature, so it helps with identifying people and help with identity theft.”

When learning to write it, it also aids in recognition.

“There’s a lot of text that’s written in cursive.” Bligh said. “As a librarian, I would want to be able to read the different types of print that could affect my job.”

One never knows when reading cursive could come in handy, and not just in school.

“In the Trayvon Martin case, one of the witnesses couldn’t read cursive,” Bligh said. “So she had to have somebody read [a transcript] to her.”

But no matter how many benefits cursive writing offers, people still tend to print.

“If I didn’t learn cursive, I guess I wouldn’t care,” Ramirez said.

The decline of cursive writing is happening, because many people now write their signatures in print instead of the traditional cursive.

“As things move along technologically, people may not need to know how to write in cursive anymore,” Bligh said. “I was thinking the other day why [cursive] is so important and I couldn’t come up with an answer.”