People often recognize My good letter to my Catholic school education – like a nun with the ruler and the taste of bodily penalty, improved my writing. But not because. It’s because of my mother. By profession, an engineer can perform perfect block letters, which are only years of work on the drawing board. As a child, I worked on imitating her print, as well as her incredibly decorative italic courses. I do not practice these skills almost enough as an adult: as a reporter he accelerates beauty when it comes to taking notes. Now, because so much of my work is done on the keyboard, I am worried that the scribble is threatened.
Mine is not an isolated devotion. Parents, educators and other supporters of writing lament over the end of the handwriting over the years. E -Mail began to issue cards and letters of decades ago. Then the smartphones appeared on the market, and our rely on paper notes, wall calendars and POST-IT reminders decreased. In American public schools, manual writing was focused on writing, because more and more children are exposed to iPads and computers in tandem with pencils. Over the past few years, AI has caused people to barely think, let alone do something. Now it may seem more than ever that handwriting is convicted.
It is not.
While handwriting and emotions are at the highest level, the case of handwriting is also stronger than ever. Sure, part of the attachment is nostalgia. There is even a strange feeling in the United States that knowledge of the italics is some Civic obligation for Americans. All these arguments regarding the handwriting result: there are real benefits to learn to hold the pen in your hand and exploit it.
American public schools still require teaching children, so this is not yet lost art, but there is some evidence that digital natives are less “ready” to write now than students in the past, says Karen Ray, lecturer in occupational therapy at the University of Newcastle in Australia. In 2021, Ray co -author test Study whether children who grew up with devices had the same motor skills as children who did not do it. While the students achieved the expected performance levels in manual dexterity tests, their general motor proficiency was lower than previous standards. Ultimately, scientists have hypothesized, the time spent on holding the devices, and not pencils can affect whether the children had all the motor skills they needed to learn handwriting after entering kindergarten.
But if children always have access to devices, is it really vital or can they write with their hands? Yes and no. If the last few years of digital work of nomads and climate coding have taught us anything, professionally a handwritten may not be so necessary in many areas. The problem is that science Handwriting may be necessary to learn everything else. “We don’t know yet what we lose in terms of acquiring reading and writing skills, rejecting the liquidity of handwriting,” says Ray.
Among the half of the dozen experts I talked to about this song, there were differences in the opinion whether moral panic was justified about writing instructions. For example, in many states, legislators have adopted provisions Make sure children learn italics in American public schools. Some experts support this, but many do not think that italic learning, especially, is so vital. But almost everyone agrees that knowledge about writing has cognitive benefits. It helps students learn to read, and the chances that they have to think about something long enough to save it, they will remember it more precisely than when entering.
“Handwriting itself really matters,” says Robert Wiley, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, whose research focuses on how the brain processes written language. “Not in an absolute sense; people will not be illiterate. But will some children be more difficult to learn because they lack this practice? Yes.”