Not long ago when junior high school students had to take the PSAT, an “audible gasps broke out in the room” when students learned they would have to write a sentence in cursive. One student complained: “Cursive? Most students my age have only encountered this foreign language in letters from grandma.” It’s even more doubtful that they’ve even heard or of could identify such once celebrated cursive styles as Spencerian script (which always reminds me of Emily Dickinson, since it’s written with a distinct slant).
First of all, many children these days are not even taught to write in, much less read, cursive script. Fully one-third of students in a recent study were unable to write legibly in cursive. And children who can’t write in cursive can’t read it either. Let them try to read the original version of the Declaration of Independence. Good luck!
But adults, too, now long away from having once written in cursive, can barely scrawl their name on a check. Take my son Dave, for example. I would defy anyone to figure out his name from looking at the signature on his checks, which seems to have been written in Chinese. Pastry chefs are beginning to complain because their assistants can no longer write a legible “happy birthday” on their cakes. Of course, doctors are notorious for their illegible handwriting. But this can have serious consequences. For example, a woman in Texas won a $450,000 award from a jury because a pharmacist could not read a doctor’s signature and gave the women’s husband the wrong medicine, which killed him. Like any other habit, if you don’t practice it, it will atrophy. That seems to be the fate of handwriting for most people today.
What do we lose when handwriting goes the way of the dodo? As we will see, we lose or weaken various cognitive skills, and as Christine Rosen, the author of the book I mentioned above, states:
Thousands of years of writing – gone in a trice as we abandon the ways of our ancestors for the convenience and efficiency of our keyboards and iPhones. Pity the poor archivists of today who have to spend their careers trying to decipher the handwritten letters of George Eliot.
As Rosen puts it, “Shifting from handwriting to keyboarding is in fact a shift away from one way of being in the world to another, with consequences that are more complicated than they might at first appear.” Let’s begin to examine some of those consequences now by focusing on the costs of doing without handwriting skills.
A study by a neuroscientist at Indiana University of young children found after using a functional MRI that practicing handwriting was superior to just having to type or trace letters. The scientist concluded:
Handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading and may facilitate reading acquisition in children.
In short, writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, seems to prime the brain for reading.
Several other studies point in the same direction. One such study showed that children who demonstrated superior handwriting performed much better on a variety of tasks related to reading efficiency and other cognitive skills. For example, they had better word recognition and reading skills, better recall of the words they wrote, and were more successful in expressing ideas. They even reported that they enjoyed learning more than students with poorer handwriting. “Handwriting,” this researcher concluded, “is also a memory process for letters – the building blocks for written language.”
What about older students, e.g., those in college?
Here, too, the results of various studies point to the drawbacks of using laptops instead of writing by hand. One study, for instance, found that “even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still impair learning because their use results in shallower processing.” Furthermore, according to Rosen, in three separate studies, it was found that students using laptops performed worse on conceptual problems compared to students who took notes by hand. In summary, we retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to put things into our own words rather than merely transcribing them robotically on our laptops. Speed may not kill, but it does not seem to confer any advantages when it comes to learning. In fact, quite the opposite.
Researchers who study the increasing use of laptops and social media as opposed to handwriting documents worry about the consequences of living in our digital age when handwriting has almost become a lost art. It may be that we have unwittingly entered into a kind of Faustian bargain in which we have sacrificed the benefits of traditional learning for the fool’s gold of technological efficiency and speed. As Rosen puts it:
It is popular to assume we have replaced one old-fashioned tool for with a more efficient alternative… But we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children. A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.
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But when it came to writing my papers for my classes, I wrote everything by hand, which I doubt my professors appreciated. And, of course, when taking exams, I had to write my answers in what were then called "blue books." In those days, we had no choice. We had to write by hand. So, writing in cursive was not just a default option; it was our only one.
When I become a professor myself and started writing my articles and books, I still wrote in cursive – until the secretaries objected because they could not read my execrable handwriting. After that, I switched to printing, but I still wrote out everything. I didn’t use a typewriter for my professional work. I remember I eventually developed a little nodule on the forefinger of my right hand from overuse in writing so much.
For example, take books. I grew up with books and I still have many hundreds on my bookshelves. In the course of my life, I have owned thousands of books. And books are still being written of course. But now there are more e-books published every year than those in print.
Then there is the distinctiveness of a person’s handwriting. You can tell a lot about a person from his or her handwriting. Ask any reputable graphologist.
But that distinctiveness is lost with the uniformity of a digital text. The written word conveys more information than one generated by a computer. This, too, is a loss.
And speaking of uniformity, what’s even worse and more troubling now that we live in the age of AI is that we can no longer be sure when we receive something on our computer or smart phone that it hasn’t been generated by a bot. And it can even send us a facsimile of a written letter. Scary.
In the days when people handwrote letters, we often looked forward to receiving them, and when they were special to us, we may have preserved and cherished them. But when letter-writing went out of fashion, we were left with impersonal e-mails. Who bothers to re-read e-mails even if we preserve them in our computer files?
In literature, such as detective stories, or some of the novels of Dickens like Bleak House, the plot may hinge on a written letter that might suddenly turn up. That’s not likely to be the case for any novels written today.
Today, we live for speed, the faster the better. There are studies that show people are increasingly impatient for something to download. If it takes more than a few seconds, they often give up. Waiting, as Rosen points out, is no longer acceptable. It has to be NOW.
But writing, especially writing books, takes time. The average person can type 40 words a minute, but only write 13. Many novelists talk about the importance of slowing things down so they can think through their plot lines and other literary devices. Slowness is not a fault; it can be a virtue.
All of these things are in danger of passing away, along with handwriting, as we move deeper into our technologically dominant world that cherishes speed and efficiency above all things.
There are, of course, other dangers to which we are now subject owing to our reliance on non-face-to-face interactions. We are wired for social contacts, but our increasing reliance on social media has already provided an abundance of evidence of the harm it can do. A few years ago, for example, the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, in his book Together, pointed out how social media are fostering an epidemic of loneliness and disconnection from others and decreasing empathy, a finding that Rosen’s book also supports.
A troubling pattern is the rise in adolescents across the country of increasing rates of suicide, with youth of color and LGBTQ+ youth most affected—all against a backdrop of teens in general reporting high levels of hopelessness, sadness, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. And of course, there is the now well recognized problem of addiction to social media. The list could go on, but I won’t since this blog is already long enough.
I will only add that I don’t think you can get addicted to handwriting. The pen is still mightier – and safer – than the mouse.
I will just let Rosen have all but the last word. As she notes in the conclusion of her book:
We know... that the more time we spend in sedentary interaction with our screens, the higher the national obesity rate and increase in related physical ailments. Likewise, an epidemic of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, particularly among young people, has occurred in tandem with increased time spent on social media platforms.
But this is the world we must all live in, and of course, it goes without saying that despite its perils, we have many reasons to celebrate it and be grateful for everything it has made possible.
BUT.
But let’s not forget to provide our kids with the tools of cursive and make them cognizant of the virtues of handwriting before they become fascinated with their technological toys. That way they will have a basis for living in both worlds, and we will all be better off for that.
Otherwise, this is the way we may come to live if we are not wise enough to wake up to the dangers posed by the over-use of social media in this brave new world of ours:
Finally, I encourage you to read Christine Rosen’s book, The Extinction of Experience, which warns us of the dangers of overly relying on experiences mediated by technological gadgets by which the stars in the heavens are only seen on a screen instead of outdoors with what used to be called “our naked eye.”
