But when ink and paper came along, moving from right to left was too messy for right handed writers and the direction of our writing changed from left to right. To the chagrin of all left handers, until the invention of the fast drying ballpoint pen! Pen and ink made it easier to produce curves rather than angles, and the shape of our letters changed accordingly.
The technology of the fountain pen meant directionality of strokes became important. The invention of the ballpoint pen meant we no longer relied on ink refills, and nib shapes. Felt tip pens meant that even gravity no longer played a role in the way we write. Yet children still complete pages of handwriting exercises based on the technology of the fountain pen and ink. Traditions die hard, particularly when no-one questions them.
Handwriting is often wrongly conflated with writing ability. Apparently he started his letters at the bottom, using upstrokes instead of downstrokes. There may have been a few reasons why he wrote his letters this way. The first language he learned to write was Greek, which has a different alphabet.
He is also a left-hander and they often do things a little differently as they try to reconcile their way of seeing the world with that of their right handed teachers. Or maybe it was just his style; natural and automatic to him. With so many things to do in a school day, it is hard to see why dedicated handwriting lessons persist. This is a view that has attracted both criticism and support.
Finland, for example, currently leads the way in Europe in a number of progressive school education methods, and a series of curriculum revisions in has led to revised guidelines for handwriting education, prioritising print and digital communication methods instead.
Harmanen says that the most important reason for the change is that cursive handwriting is not used much anymore. There is research to support the notion that handwriting can provide several cognitive benefits, however. Handwriting may boost fine motor skills in your hands and fingers, for example.
A study by the University of Washington found that while writing by hand and by keyboard had some overlap, they utilised different brain functions. This sentiment was echoed by William Klemm in an article written for Psychology Today in You have to pay attention and think about what and how you are doing it. You have to practise. Brain imaging studies show that cursive activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding.
Further academic study suggests that handwriting can stimulate visual recognition and memory retention. In a article published in the journal Trends in Neuroscience and Education, authors Karin James and Laura Engelhardt found that handwriting could be crucial for helping children learn the alphabet. In the study, a group of pre-school children practised learning letters by various means, including writing them out by hand and by typing them on a keyboard.
Afterwards, the children were shown various letters while lying in an MRI scanner. It suggests that handwriting might aid in mastering reading and writing in children. So, handwriting could have cognitive benefits, artistic merit, and a personal touch — and could help students learn faster. Still, there are technologies vying to replace even the typed word. Learning letters on a screen engages at most two physical channels: the eyes and the fingertips.
It is not possible to tell one letter from another by the shape of the keys. Learning letters through writing them involves numerous tactile experiences, engaging the fine-motor muscles of the fingers and hand, and larger muscles of the arm and body, as well as the eyes.
Many writers attest to the value of a handwritten first draft and the subsequent process of reading through and interacting with their writing by annotating, correcting, editing, and reshaping it as a whole. Typing on a screen tempts us instead to edit as we go, fragmenting and dissecting, and potentially interfering with the organic flow of ideas.
Even in this digital age, many accomplished people consider it critical to their success to keep a small notebook and pen handy so that they can jot down ideas in the moment and refer back to them later. Many historical documents were written by hand and are now indecipherable to any who are unable to read cursive. Being able to decipher both cursive and print is an important part of language literacy.
Handwriting can help us slow down and fully engage with our thoughts. This is certainly an asset when transcribing the spoken word, but 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. With a pen in hand, there are instantly accessible creative and artistic opportunities that are not possible to weave into the experience of typing on a keyboard.
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