{"id":4427,"date":"2015-05-27T09:58:41","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T09:58:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=4427"},"modified":"2015-05-27T09:58:41","modified_gmt":"2015-05-27T09:58:41","slug":"writing-by-hand-could-change-your-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/writing-by-hand-could-change-your-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing by Hand Could Change Your Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

New research makes a strong defense of a dying art.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Source:<\/a>
Source: mimagephotography\/Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The debut of the Remington typewriter in 1873 radically altered how people could communicate thoughts. Since then, we have debated whether handwriting was still necessary.\u00a0Today, kids tap\u00a0keyboards and phones but rarely, if ever, write by hand even a thank-you card.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s still good reason for mastering this diminishing craft.<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing by hand is easier than using a keyboard\u2014and more fruitful. In one\u00a0study,\u00a0(link is external)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>second-graders wrote more words, faster, by pen than by keyboard;\u00a0fourth- and sixth-graders were more likely to write complete sentences with a pen. Other\u00a0research\u00a0(link is external)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>found that kids produce more ideas when\u00a0writing by hand and that hand-written essays are more coherent and thoughtful\u2014as well as grammatical.<\/span><\/p>\n

Does this phenomenon affect us only after we learn to read\u00a0or at the onset of oureducation<\/span><\/a>? In another\u00a0experiment(link is external)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>, five-year-olds who couldn\u2019t read or write printed, typed, or traced letters and shapes. When they saw the letters and shapes during a\u00a0brain<\/span><\/a>scan, a part of the brain known as the \u201creading circuit\u201d lit up only after printing, not after typing or tracing.<\/span><\/div>\n

While literate adults recognize letters despite changes in font, size, or case, children may learn to do that by writing, the authors suggest. The reason may lie in the fact that writing by hand requires several finger movements, compared to hitting a key. According to co-author Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, those finger movements activate parts of the brain that help us think.<\/span><\/p>\n

The case for teaching children cursive, however, is less clear, since at that stage of development they have already learned to recognize letters. According to a report from the Miami-Dade public school system, most schools currently teach cursive handwriting for 10-to-15 minutes a day in the spring of second or\u00a0third grade. Until the 1970s, penmanship was typically a distinct daily lesson from first through sixth grade\u2014and a separate grade entry on report cards. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT in 2006, only 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students who took the test wrote their answers in cursive, the Miami-Dade report notes;\u00a0the others printed. (The Common Core curriculum doesn\u2019t require cursive at all, and some states have abandoned teaching it altogether.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Even many adults who grew up learning to write by hand hate it and have long since abandoned trying to write legible cursive. But their\u00a0ineptitude should not prevent them from articulating their thoughts;\u00a0Victor Hugo, James Joyce, and Lord Byron were all scrawlers. Mastering cursive again would actually make it\u00a0easier<\/em>\u00a0to write\u2014the fastest hand-writers use a mix of cursive and print, according to literacy and handwriting expert Steve Graham. Some\u00a0argue(link is external)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0that learning cursive is helpful for people with dyslexia. It is also a form of self-expression, since writers develop idiosyncrasies, although there is\u00a0no good evidence(link is external)<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0that we can reliably assess\u00a0personality<\/span><\/a>\u00a0by examining handwriting samples.<\/span><\/p>\n

Will we have lost something important if the next generation of Americans never send hand-written thank-you notes or post a shopping list on a refrigerator? Could you recognize your own child\u2019s handwriting? In a completely non-scientific poll, I asked severalparents<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and none could definitively say yes. While the art of handwriting is dying out, and may require additional effort to learn initially, that extra attention\u00a0could benefit both children and adults in terms of literacy,\u00a0retention, and articulation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Source: psychologytoday.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New research makes a strong defense of a dying art. The debut of the Remington typewriter in 1873 radically altered how people could communicate thoughts. Since then, we have debated whether handwriting was still necessary.\u00a0Today, kids tap\u00a0keyboards and phones but rarely, if ever, write by hand even a thank-you card. However, there\u2019s still good reason […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-curiosity","category-psychology"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037-300x222.jpg",300,222,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",88,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",320,237,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",96,71,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shutterstock_231366037.jpg",150,111,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Curiosity<\/a> Psychology<\/a>","tag_info":"Psychology","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}