People are often commendable My good handwriting of Catholic schooling – like a nun with rulers and a taste of physical punishment perfected my brushwork. But that’s not the reason. This is because of my mom. She is an engineer who can execute the perfect block letters that have only been working on a drawing board for many years. As a kid, I tried to imitate her prints and her incredibly gorgeous cursive script. However, I lack practice as an adult: as a journalist, speed is better than beauty when it comes to taking notes. Now, since I’ve done a lot of work on my keyboard, I’m also worried that Scrawl is in danger.
Mine is not isolated decentralization. Parents, educators and peer advocates have been lamenting the end of handwriting for years. Emails began deleting cards and letters decades ago. Then, smartphones are on the market, and our dependence on paper notes, wall calendars and postal reminds you of less. In public schools in the United States, the focus has shifted from handwriting to typing as more and more children are exposed to iPad and computers at the same time as pencils. AI has done this over the past few years, so humans have little to think, let alone write down something. Now more than ever, the handwriting is doomed to fail.
It’s not.
While hand-waving and emotion are at an all-time high, handwritten cases are also stronger than ever. Of course, some attachments are nostalgic. In the United States, there is even a strange feeling that knowing cursive script is some kind of civic obligation to Americans. All of these arguments about handwriting ignore something: There is real benefit to learning to hold the pen in your hand and use it.
Karen Ray, a lecturer at occupational therapy at Newcastle University in the United States, said public schools in the United States still require the teaching of handwriting, so it is not a lost art, but there is evidence that digital natives are less prepared to write than students in the past. In 2021, Ray co-studied a study that examined whether children with the same motor skills as children without them are the same as children without them. Although these students achieved the expected performance levels in manual agility testing, their overall athletic level was lower than previous specifications. Ultimately, the researchers hypothesized that the time spent holding the device instead of the pencil could affect whether a child has all the motor skills needed to learn handwriting when entering kindergarten.
But if the kids can always use the device, is it really important that they can write with their hands? whether. If the digital nomadic work and atmosphere coding of the past few years have taught us anything, then professionally, handwriting may not be necessary in many fields. The problem is study Learning everything else may be necessary. “We don’t know yet what we’ve lost in literacy by removing the emphasis on handwriting fluency,” Ray said.
Among the six experts I talked to about this piece, the panic about whether it is necessary to have a moral panic. For example, in many states, lawmakers have passed legislation to ensure children learn cursive scripts in U.S. public schools. Some experts support this, but many do not think it is important to learn cursive script. But almost everyone agrees that knowing how to write has cognitive benefits. It can help students learn to read and it is possible to think about whether they have to think about it long enough to write it down and they will remember it more thoroughly than typing.
“Handwriting itself is really important,” said Robert Wiley, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, whose research focuses on the written language of the brain. “It’s not the absolute meaning; people won’t become illiterate. But, will some children be difficult to learn because they lack this exercise? Yes.”
