How often do you write by hand? Several times per day, weekly, once every month, hardly ever? If you are one of those people who switched (almost) completely to digital writing, you might want to reconsider. Writing by hand brings benefits to the mind and brain that you don’t want to miss.
I am not the first to point this out, of course. Many people are aware of how powerful the simple act of putting words on paper with a pen is, among them scientists, journalists, educators, and creatives. So over the last few days, I have looked into some of their accounts.
It was quite a ride, I can tell you. My research took me from one interesting aspect to another. I found newspaper articles, personal accounts, research papers, Wikipedia entries, and much more. It was like going down the famous rabbit hole.
So did you know, for example, that there is a neurological disorder that can impair a person’s ability to write longhand? I didn’t. It is called dysgraphia, and “it is a specific learning disability as well as a transcription disability, meaning that it is a writing disorder associated with impaired handwriting, orthographic coding and finger sequencing (the movement of muscles required to write),” as Wikipedia explains it.
I also learned that a significant deterioration in handwriting skills could be an early diagnostic sign for neurological problems, according to a report by Gwendolyn Bounds in the Wall Street Journal. As more people are migrating to computer keyboards, doctors are concerned that this diagnostic tool is getting lost, Bounds writes.
Then there is the whole discussion about graphology (the pseudoscientific or at least questionable analysis of handwriting to determine someone's personality traits), not to be confused with graphanalysis (which is the forensic examination of handwritten documents wherein the examiner tries to address concerns about potential authorship of a document) or graphemics (the linguistic study of writing systems and their basic components, graphemes). Calligraphy, on the other hand, is a visual art related to writing. (Specifically, it “is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instruments,” according to Wikipedia.)
Okay, okay, I’m getting sidetracked here. So let’s return to this post's main topic: the benefits of writing by hand. I will focus on three aspects that I find especially interesting: learning & memory, creativity, and therapeutic effects.
Learning - Memory
There is plenty of evidence that writing by hand fosters learning. For example, in a 2013 study from Indiana University, children who practiced printing letters by hand showed more enhanced and “adult-like” neural activity in the brain than children who had simply looked at letters.
Adults may benefit similarly from longhand when learning a graphically different language, like Mandarin, or a symbol system for music, mathematics, or chemistry, as Gwendoyn Bounds writes in her report in the Wall Street Journal mentioned above. For instance, in a 2009 study also from Indiana University, adults were asked to distinguish between characters new to them and a mirror image of these characters after producing the characters using pen-and-paper writing or a computer keyboard. The result: The hand-writers recognized the characters' proper orientation better and could remember it longer than the typers. This suggests that the specific movements memorized when learning to write aided the visual identification of graphic shapes.
In the same vain, a small 2021 study from Johns Hopkins University suggests that writing longhand refines fine-tuned motor skills and creates a perceptual-motor experience that seems to help adults learn a new letter system (like Arabic) "surprisingly faster and significantly better" than if they tried to learn the same material by typing on a keyboard or watching videos. After six learning sessions, all participants in the video-watching and type-writing groups had learned the Arabic alphabet and could identify its 28 letters. However, people in the handwriting group, who used pen and paper to write each letter during their learning sessions, gained the same level of proficiency after just two learning sessions. The hand-writers were also better at writing, reading, and spelling these letters.
Here is an interesting video in which the researchers Robert Wiley and Brenda Rapp talk about their study.
The learning advantage of longhand is not restricted to learning letters or symbols. For example, a 2014 study by Pam Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel Oppenheimer (now Carnegie Mellon University) found that students who took lecture notes longhand performed better on conceptual questions than students who took notes on laptops. The scientists’ explanation: Laptop note-takers tended to transcribe lectures verbatim, whereas hand-writers processed and reframed the content. As you can’t write word for word what the lecturer says, Oppenheimer explains it in a Medium article, longhand forces you to rephrase the content in your own words. “To do that, people had to think deeply about the material and actually understand the arguments. This helped them learn the material better.” The bottom line is that writing by hand usually takes longer and slows you down, which can be beneficial to learning.
Learning and memory are not the only areas where writing by hand has beneficial effects. It also seems to unleash more creativity and affords more therapeutic effects than typing on a keyboard.
Creativity
Many authors prefer pen over keys, at least for part of their work, as Nancy Olson reports in Forbes magazine. For example, Stephen King supposedly wrote Dreamcatcher in longhand, as did J. K. Rowling with The Tales of Beedle the Bard. “F. Scott Fitzgerald did it, as did Hemingway, Kafka, and countless others, each of whom had access to either a typewriter or, later, a computer,” Olson writes. “They all chose to put pen to paper and see where it took them.” And she continues:
This is perhaps the true magic of a pen: It transports us to unexpected places, on wings that require no more than a timely shot of ink to keep them aloft, destination unknown. And in the process, the mindfulness writing engenders encourages calm and creativity.
Some scientists would agree. Recent neuroscientific research has uncovered a distinct neural pathway that is only activated when we physically draw out our letters seems to foster creativity.
For example, a study by Virginia Berninger (University of Washington) demonstrated that in grades two, four, and six, children wrote more words, wrote faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard. She concluded that handwriting—both printing and cursive—versus typing on a keyboard activated different brain patterns.
Why? “When we write a letter of the alphabet, we form it component stroke, by component stroke, and that process of production involves pathways in the brain that go near or through parts that manage emotion,” Berninger explains in Fast Company. “Pressing a key doesn’t stimulate those pathways the same way. It’s possible that there’s not the same connection to the emotional part of the brain when people type, as opposed to writing in longhand.”
Also, when you write by hand, you write more thoughtfully, and such mindful writing rests the brain, unlocking potential creativity, adds neuroscientist Claudia Aguirre.
Therapeutic effects
Speaking of emotions, writing by hand seems to have a stronger therapeutic effect than typing. For example, a 1999 British study found that writing about a stressful life experience by hand, as opposed to typing about it, led to higher levels of self-disclosure and greater therapeutic benefits.
There is one caveat, though. This study was published 23 years ago. So it’s possible that these findings may not hold up among people today, as Markham Heid points out in Medium, many of whom grew up with computers and are more accustomed to expressing themselves via typed text. So we have to wait and see.
See you next week!
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