To Schools Still Teaching Penmanship: Write On!

We're clearly well into the digital age, and flashing back to trudging off to college with a typewriter as I did in 1984 just seems so laughably quaint. The state of Maine has gone so far as to put laptops into the hands of its students, and it doesn't require a stretch of the imagination to explain why penmanship is rapidly disappearing from public school curricula.

But we may want to rethink totally jettisoning those handwriting lessons, and not for any nostalgic reasons, but for the sake of our cognitive faculties.

According to research carried out at the University of Washington that involved test subjects of second, fourth and sixth graders, kids who write it out by hand demonstrated the capacity to write more, write better and write faster compared to their computer-using counterparts.

The students were given a series of tasks to perform: print out the alphabet by hand, then write it out on the computer; next, compose a handwritten sentence starting with the word "writing" and one on the computer starting with the word "reading;" and lastly, write two short essays during a 10-minute period, the first by hand and the second on the computer.

The results indicated that the computer was the superior tool for constructing the alphabet, and the single sentence results were reportedly inconclusive. But when it came to the essay assignment, handwriting trumped the computer.

The test subjects in all three age groups wrote longer essays by hand, and completed them more quickly. And the handwritten essays of the fourth and sixth graders contained a greater number of correct, complete sentences. (Researchers noted that second graders typically don't have solid understanding of the grammatical rules governing sentence construction in explaining why that sub-group showed equivalent results by comparing handwritten and computer-written essays.)

Sadly, I'm certain that the mimeograph machine, with its cool, moist, funky-smelling hard copy is not poised for any comeback. But our schools might think twice before getting rid of that lined paper.

Image courtesy of lucianvenutian, via Flickr