Most of us go days without writing anything by hand, and when we finally need to jot something down, it looks like the writing of a third grader. Writing by hand in the digital age feels almost antiquated, but there are plenty of reasons to maintain the quality of your penmanship, or (gasp) even improve it.
Writing by Hand Can Lead to Better Learning
There are cognitive reasons that you might want to revisit your penmanship and start writing again. As you might’ve heard before, taking notes by hand can actually help you retain more information, as you’re essentially forced to reframe the information you’re hearing instead of transcribing it directly. There’s science to back it up too.
There’s even research on children that demonstrates writing by hand can cause people not only retain more information, but to also have more ideas. Typing and writing are associated with different brain patterns, says psychologist Virginia Bernigner. The children in her study who wrote by hand actually produced more words and ideas than their typing counterparts. The children with better handwriting also expressed “greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory.” Actively engaging in the physical act of forming letters and words can stir your creative juices by sparking areas of your brain that you otherwise wouldn’t be using.
Read more: Bring Back Handwriting
