The Letter She Cannot Read

Cedar Valley News — February 26, 2026
The Letter She Cannot Read
By: Chloe Papadakis
From the fictional town of Cedar Valley, where characters from Quiet Echo continue to respond to real-world events.

My daughter got a birthday card from my mother last month. She opened it at the kitchen table, looked at it for a long time, and handed it to me. “What does it say?”

She is seven. She can read chapter books. She reads menus at restaurants and street signs from the back seat. But she held her grandmother’s card like it was written in a language from another country.

It was cursive.

I read it to her. My mother had written three sentences about how proud she was and how fast the years go. Simple things. The kind of thing a grandmother writes because she wants her hand — not a keyboard — to say it. My daughter listened, nodded, and went back to her cereal.

I put the card on the refrigerator. I have looked at it every morning since. Not because of what it says. Because of what it means when a child cannot read her own grandmother’s handwriting.

Cursive instruction was dropped from Common Core education standards in 2010. Forty-one states adopted those standards. An entire generation of American children grew up without learning to read or write in connected script. At Harvard, historian Drew Gilpin Faust asked her seminar students how many could read cursive. Two out of three could not. These are among the most educated young people in the country. They cannot read a letter from 1943.

In Kentucky, a teacher named Alesha Duff — a mother herself — said her own children look at her handwriting and ask, “What are you writing? Is it a foreign language?”

It is not a foreign language. It is their language. It is every birthday card, every recipe box, every love letter, every will, every diary, every note folded into a pocket before somebody left for a war they might not come back from. And a generation of children cannot read any of it without asking someone else to translate.

Lars said yesterday a man who does not read has handed his thinking to whoever talks loudest. He is right. But there is something even quieter disappearing. A child who cannot read cursive has not handed her thinking to anyone. She has lost access to the people who came before her. The thinking already happened. The letters were already written. They are sitting in shoeboxes in closets and attics all over this country, and the children they were meant for cannot open them.

Brain scans show something else. When young children write letters by hand, neural circuits light up in ways typing does not activate. The brain responds differently to the physical act of forming a letter — the pressure of the pencil, the curve of the stroke, the connection between one letter and the next. Cursive is not decoration. It is how the hand teaches the mind to think in connected lines. Take it away and you do not just lose a style of writing. You lose a way of thinking.

Twenty-five states have brought cursive back into their classrooms. California dropped it in 2010 and reinstated it in 2024. Kentucky added it for the 2025-2026 school year. Legislators are not doing this because they are nostalgic. They are doing it because reading scores are falling, because children are losing fine motor skills, because a country full of people who cannot sign their own name is a country handing its identity to machines.

To be sure, typing matters. Digital literacy matters. I plan events for a living. My work lives on screens. I am not arguing we go backward. I am arguing we do not cut the thread. There is room in a child’s day for both a keyboard and a pencil. There always was. We just decided there was not, and a generation of grandmothers’ birthday cards became unreadable.

I think about Mildred Olson. Lars says she reads every night. I would bet anything she writes letters too — real ones, in cursive, the kind you keep. And I think about what happens in twenty years when the person she wrote them for holds the paper up and says, “What does it say?”

My mother’s handwriting is not perfect. It slopes to the right. The loops are tall. The t’s are crossed high. It looks like her. I would know her handwriting anywhere, the way I know her voice on the phone before she says her name. My daughter does not have this. She has never seen cursive used as a living thing. To her it is artifact. Museum glass. Something old people did.

I sat down with her last weekend and wrote her name in cursive on a piece of notebook paper. She traced it with her finger. She asked me to write it again. She asked me to write Grandma’s name. We filled a page. She kept the paper.

It took four minutes. Nobody assigned it. No screen was involved. A mother and a daughter, a pencil, and a piece of paper. The oldest technology in the world, doing what it has always done — connecting one hand to another across time.

Write your child’s name in cursive tonight. Let them watch your hand move. Let them trace it. It does not need to be a lesson. It just needs to be a thread.

The card is still on my refrigerator. Next time, I want her to read it herself.

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series. While the people and town are fictional, the national events they reflect on are real.

Want to know the full story behind Cedar Valley? Teresa, Caleb, Dan, and the community you’ve come to know in these editorials first came together in Quiet Echor. Discover how a small town found its way from fear to fellowship — one quiet act of courage at a time. Available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3ME4nSs

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.