Five reasons to handwriting

In world more and more digitalized, where AI is everywhere, we’re still celebrating the handwriting day, on the 23^th of January.

But why do we have to still use a pen, or a pencil to write something, when our digital devices are so faster and even better of our calligraphy?

There are at least 5 reasons to still use handwriting.

A study published in the Current Directions in Psychological Science journal made an overview of the skills that handwriting involves [1].

The idea is that what we do with our bodies creates and constantly changes our knowledge of the world: every eye movement, head turn, object held, or door opened is an action that creates new perceptual information. The interactions among action-environment-perception form the brain systems that underlie our cognition. These brain changes emerge through a coupling of perceptual and motor systems such that our perceptions are intrinsically linked to our actions through brain networks. Several functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies have demonstrated that perceptual and motor systems become linked only when individuals learn through self-generated actions. Self-generated actions serve to enhance a multitude of capabilities, for example hand-eye coordination, depth perception, sound recognition, spatial understanding, and even language development. It may not be surprising then that our self-generated actions also have a significant effect on how we process letters.

In particular, the study highlights that handwriting and letter perception recruit the same network of activation in the literate brain, but before people become literate, handwriting serves to recruit this same network, implying that handwriting experience plays a crucial role in the formation of the brain network that underlies letter recognition.

But there’s much more! In summary five good reasons to handwriting below [2].

The brain engages differently when we write something by hand. Studies show that writing improves memory; students retain learning better when working with new ideas through handwriting instead of typing.

Engaging the body by handwriting helps make writing a more holistic activity. There is something uniquely physical and multidimensional about putting pen to paper to form words and sentences.

Handwriting can help us slow down and fully engage with our thoughts. Thoughts need to breathe, as do writers, and writing by hand conveniently holds such a space for thoughts to fully form before being set down in sentences.

Learning the alphabet by interacting with each letter in many different physical ways helps students imprint and retain the letters and the letter sounds for easier recall when learning to read.

Handwritten notes to friends and loved ones are intimate and personal in a way that email and typewritten text cannot fully convey. Nothing but handwriting can fully represent the mood and personality of the writer. A handwritten love note is a creative gift to cherish!