The loops and curls of cursive handwriting have all but vanished from college essay exam blue books.

On rare occasions when college students write by hand, nearly all of them use what educators call manuscript form, which is to say, they print.

Cursive writing is endangered and may near extinction in another generation, educators say. With the rise of word processing, texting and twittering, young people have fewer needs to write by hand.

is on its way to becoming an artifact for calligraphers.

"I do not write in cursive," says Kiran Pattani, 20, a freshman at

in Newberg. "I just feel printing is easier and easier to read as well."

Andy Coyle, 18, a freshman at the

, says he hasn't written in cursive since elementary school. He hasn't needed to, he said, until the SAT college entrance exam required him to write a statement in cursive, which he found challenging.

"I print," he says. "I think it is faster. ... It is easier to read."

At the

Richard S. Christen, an education professor, leafs through short essays his students wrote in class. Only two of the 17 papers are in cursive.

The College Board got similar results when it sampled 6,498 essays written for its SAT college entrance exam between March 2005 and January 2006. Fifteen percent of the essays were written in cursive.

What most concerns Christen, who has studied the history of handwriting, is the loss of the aesthetic qualities of handwriting with its descent into cold print. Cursive writing in its flourishes and graceful strokes expresses an artistic beauty that goes beyond its utility and gives artistic experience to those who use it, he says. Students today "are not doing this kind of craftsmanship activity that they used to do on a daily basis," he says.

They also may be losing an edge in their learning. Researchers using magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity say handwriting, whether print or cursive, engages more of the brain in learning and forming ideas.

Oregon's public school curriculum standards call for teaching cursive handwriting to students in third and fourth grade. But in fifth grade through grade 12, students are expected only to write legibly, whether in cursive or print.

At Elmonica Elementary School in Beaverton, third-grade teacher Kerri Swygard is teaching her students the sweeping arcs and down-curve strokes that will eventually form and join letters in cursive

type script. She spends about a half-hour three days a week on the writing lessons, which she says is typical. By year's end, her students will be writing in cursive, she says.

"Most of the kids love it," says Swygard, in her 14th year of teaching. "They've seen their older brothers and sisters writing in cursive. They think it is more interesting."

But they also are learning how to type on keyboards, and by fifth grade, they will begin doing their writing on computers.

"Beautiful handwriting is not valued anymore because of keyboarding," says

, author of "Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting," published in 2009. "That is what is taking over in schools."

Before computers, students were expected to write their assignments in cursive all the way through high school. Teachers widely refused to accept print. But today, high school students are expected to deliver their writing assignments in type.

Susan Bartley makes an exception in her Advanced Placement English class at Franklin High School in Portland, where she requires students to write an essay a week by hand. She does so, she says, to prepare them for an AP exam that requires them to write by hand. But few students write in cursive, she says, and those who do are almost always girls.

"It seems having lovely cursive writing sort of has a femininity," she says.

In college, it's possible for students to almost entirely avoid writing by hand. They can send notes to friends by email or text. They can take notes in class on their laptops or iPad tablets. Students say they see no consequences for choosing to print.

"Since there is no need for (cursive), at least for me, I don't think it is that important," says Coyle of the UO.

Leslie Rill, a communications professor at Portland State University, says she does not care whether students write in cursive or print as long as their writing is legible. In most cases, she expects their work to be typed.

Until a century ago, American schoolchildren were not taught how to print. But in efforts to help primary students improve their fine motor control and eye-hand coordination and to connect writing to the type they were learning to read in books, schools in 1921 began teaching children to print before they learned cursive.

Also in the early 20th century, the British Arts and Crafts movement, which was trying to revive traditional handicrafts, began promoting a simple style of cursive writing with roots in the Italian Renaissance called Italic.

The

is characterized by "gently-slanting oval shapes, an absence of loops, and joins between most but not all letters," Christen, the UP professor, writes in an article on handwriting in Oregon schools.

Lloyd Reynolds, a professor for more than 40 years at Reed College in Portland, joined the Italic movement and pushed the script among Portland teachers.

He argued handwriting transformed learning from a visual process to one involving all the senses, Christen writes, and Italic was superior because more than other scripts, it embodied the principles of craftsmanship.

In response to Reynolds' campaign, the Portland School District in 1983 started teaching children to write in Italic script. Other Oregon districts also adopted Italic. When Portland district leaders proposed switching to

script in 1998, they got hit with a flood of letters and emails in protest from Italic supporters. Even so, the district made the switch and now teaches D'Nealian.

In the past two years, handwriting advocates nationwide have stepped up a battle to keep cursive alive, whatever the script, Christen says.

"If it is gone, it is gone," he says. "When are we going to get it back?"

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