Handwriting is in decline. Today, the rise of electronic communication means that the act of writing is delegated to machines, as is the thought process that goes into composition. Recent surveys show that 10% of us say they have handwritten nothing in the past year, while a large proportion of 18-24 year-olds say they’ve never scribbled down a shopping list. Even texting is starting to look old-fashioned, as kids dictate into their phones or send voice messages.
Yet research shows that handwriting benefits the mind in a way no technical innovation can replicate. Whether you are trying to grasp complex ideas or improve your recall, writing things down on paper is hard to beat. According to research, two thirds of us accept that handwriting conveys more emotion than typing.
Mellissa Prunty, reader in occupational therapy at Brunel University London, who has researched the relationship between handwriting and learning, says, ‘Holding a pen with our fingers, pressing it on a surface, and moving our hands to create letters and words is a complex cognitive-motor skill that requires a lot of our attention. This deeper level of processing, which involves mapping sounds to letter formations, has been shown to support reading and spelling in children.’
Robert Wiley, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and co-author of a study on The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Literacy Learning, says that learning a new word involves connecting an abstract symbol with information on the visual, motor, and auditory levels. ‘Handwriting can activate more connections across these different dimensions compared with typing’.
