Has Technology Killed Cursive Handwriting?

Think back to the last time you wrote in cursive — you know, that fancy penmanship you may have learned way back in grade school, complete with elegant loops, curls and flourishes.

These days, with our fingers tapping on QWERTY keyboards, Evernote taking the place of sticky notes and tablets replacing paper notebooks, a question arises: Has the rise of technology led to the fall of cursive handwriting?

In the United States, somewhere around the third grade, cursive handwriting instruction has long been a sort of milestone, or right of passage. But in recent years, the nation's Common Core State Standards — which at least 45 states and the District of Columbia, have voluntarily adopted — took out the requirement for cursive instruction in K through 12 schools. It has stirred quite the debate, since it's up to each individual state to decide whether cursive is important enough to teach its own students. In recent months, North Carolina legislators approved a bill to require its students to learn cursive in elementary school,