Students are typing and texting more frequently and writing less in school and studies show it is hampering their brain development.
With the proliferation of keyboards both large and small, students, and adults for that matter, are not doing much actual writing anymore. Study after study show that writing by hand is vital for brain development and cognition, helping children hone fine motor skills and learn to express and generate ideas. Yet the time spent teaching penmanship in most schools has diminished to nearly nothing. Here is how the brain and penmanship interact:
Writing by hand gets ideas out faster – A University of Wisconsin study found that grade school students not only wrote faster by hand but generated more ideas when composing essays by hand. The study also found that the sequential finger movements required to write by hand activate brain regions involving thought, language and short-term memory.
Writing increases Neural activity – – At Indiana University children who practiced writing by hand exhibited far more advanced, ‘adult-like’ neural activity than those students who just looked at examples of letters as if on a keyboard.
Good handwriting makes you smarter – Several studies have shown that the same mediocre essay scores much higher if written with good penmanship and lower with poor penmanship. People do judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting. The consequences are real: on the handwritten essay portion of the SAT, which is now required, an essay deemed illegible gets a zero.
This is not just an English-language phenomenon – Chinese and Japanese youth are suffering from what is being called “character amnesia”. They can’t remember how to create letters, thanks to computers and text messaging. Some researches believe China’s overall reading ability is beginning to suffer as a result.
While all the research is fascinating, it simply shows what writers have long suspected. While Novelist Robert Stone mostly types his manuscripts, he also writes. “When something becomes elusive,” he says,”then I write in longhand to be precise. When you are typing you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed – You lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.”
Is your child’s school teaching writing in a thoughtful, consistent manner? It may be time to investigate to make sure they are indeed benefiting from writing by hand.
For more information about an excellent education for your child, contact Trinity Classical Academy, where writing and penmanship are rigorously taught and practiced every day by all grade levels, at 661-296-2601 or visit www.TrinityClassicalAcademy.com.