A high school student who took the preliminary SAT for college admittance confessed to the Wall Street Journal that “audible gasps broke out in the room” when students learned they would have to write a one-sentence statement certifying that all the work is the student’s own in cursive, or joined-up handwriting. “Cursive? Most students my age have only encountered this foreign language in letters from Grandma.”
Schoolchildren are not the only ones who can no longer write or read cursive. Fewer and fewer of us put pen to paper to record our thoughts, correspond with friends, or even to jot down a grocery list. Instead of begging a celebrity for an autograph, we request a selfie. Many people no longer have the skill to do more than scrawl their name in an illegible script, and those who do will see that skill atrophy as they rely more on computers and smartphones. A newspaper in Toronto recorded the lament of a pastry instructor who realised that many of his culinary students couldn’t properly pipe an inscription in icing on a cake—their cursive writing was too shaky and indistinct to begin with.
So why be concerned? Chalk it up (if you can still do that with your hands and a piece of chalk) to one more aspect of human toil replaced with enabling technology.
Or is it?
As The Guardian continued:
But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills, and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that, for thousands of years, has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead.
But that’s not all.
Research has found that good handwriting isn’t merely an aid to communication. There is something about writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, that primes the brain for its ability to learn how to read.
Psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared students taking notes by hand to students who took notes on a laptop computer or phone to test whether the medium mattered for overall student performance.
It did.
They found that there was “shallower processing.” In three different and distinct experiments, they found that students who used laptop computers performed worse on “conceptual questions” when compared to students who took notes by hand. In essence, when we ty