Does Handwriting Matter?

Psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Here are some findings from recent studies on handwriting:

• Children learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand; and they remain better able to generate ideas and retain information.
• Writing activates a unique neural circuit in the brain. There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation that seems to make it easier to learn.
• Printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns — and each results in a distinct end product. When children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas.
• It now appears that there may be a difference between printing and cursive writing — a distinction of particular importance as the teaching of cursive disappears in curriculum after curriculum.
• For adults, typing may be a fast and efficient alternative to longhand, but that very efficiency may diminish our ability to process new information. Not only do we learn letters better when we commit them to memory through writing, memory and learning ability in general may benefit.
• New research suggests that writing by hand allows students to process a lecture’s contents and reframe it—a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding.

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