In our daily rush, we aren’t so conscious of sketching a shopping list or short message on a postcard. But when did you write longhand the last time? If you’re a typist, do yourself a favour and take a look at these key benefits of handwriting. Pick up a pad of paper and a pen to take some handwritten notes!
One doesn’t need to be a graphoman to enjoy the benefits of handwriting. Maybe they have nightmares thinking back their penmanship, calligraphy or character writing lessons, but sometimes they become mad about how to store thousands of notes about different lectures and seminars. A few of them have the power to type all of those and after throw them away. But why can’t we be free from paper and pen?
Either you go to a conference or a study visit, you will definitely be given at least one notebook or a pad. There was a Guardian roundtable event, where the delegates noted that everyone at the table had chosen to use pens, not laptops, to make notes. One reason for this could be that writing plays a social role in our lives and having a laptop open would be rude in such circumstances, it is more difficult to engage with others. Maybe this explains why we feel uncomfortable or strange in this pandemic season during our virtual meetings.
It’s no surprise that as technology has become increasingly integrated into our daily lives the traditional act of writing with a pen has been somewhat forgotten. The ease of word processing documents, as well as the development of applications that allow us to sync our notes across multiple devices, has made the purpose of handwriting almost redundant. Many schools in the United States don’t teach handwriting but small children learn how to type properly.
Writing notes by hand has many cognitive benefits.
Handwriting reinforces our reading and language processing skills. Writing by hand allows time to slow down the thought process enabling the writer to think about the words, how they are spelt and the structure of the writing; all making the writer more adept at the language they are using.Handwriting can also improve our memory. Whilst it has been argued that typing notes may allow us to focus more on what we are listening to, research has found that writing creates unique pathways in the brain causing those who wrote their notes by hand to remember the content more than those who typed them.
In the journal Psychological Science, published in April 2020, the two US researchers, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives students a better grasp of the subject. When you write your notes by hand, you develop a stronger conceptual understanding than by typing. Since handwriting is slower and more tedious, it makes it harder to take notes verbatim. Therefore, you have to process the information and summarize it in a way that makes sense for you.
The physical act of writing can also have other benefits with creative writing or brainstorming. When typing there can be a tendency to edit as you go along rather than letting your ideas flow. This can be counterproductive for the creative process. With a blank piece of paper, you tend to just write, get your ideas onto paper and leave the editing process until later. There aren’t any restrictions on a blank page where you can write, allowing you to link things together, circle important points and add side notes wherever makes sense.
Finally, there is another, but no less important point that writing forms a unique and irreplaceable part of our culture. This is particularly the case for written languages made up of characters such as Chinese or Arab languages. Because of these characters’ complexity, people study different combinations of the Latin alphabet as a code for typing. Nowadays there are special touchpads or tapping keyboards to make Chinese writing easier.
Handwriting styles are unique to the individual and something which simply cannot be replicated with a keyboard. That’s why we can find smart notebooks appearing besides of other electronic devices to declare the victory of handwriting.