The End of Handwriting

Summary

People often credit my good handwriting to my Catholic school education—like a nun with a ruler and a taste for corporal punishment perfected my penmanship. But that’s not why. It’s because of my mom. An engineer by trade, she can execute the kind of perfect block letters that only come with years of working on a drawing board. As a kid, I worked to mimic her print as well as her incredibly ornate cursive. I don’t practice those skills nearly enough as an adult, though: As a reporter, speed trumps beauty when it comes to taking notes. Now, with so much of my job being done on a keyboard, I worry even that scrawl is at risk.Mine is not an isolated devolution. Parents, educators, and fellow penmanship advocates have been lamenting the end of handwriting for years. Email began edging out cards and letters decades ago. Then smartphones hit the market, and our reliance on paper notes, wall calendars, and Post-it reminders dwindled. In US public schools, the focus has shifted from handwriting to typing, as more and more kids are exposed to iPads and computers in tandem with pencils. And in the past few years, AI has made it so that humans barely need to think, let alone jot something down. Now more than ever, it might seem as though handwriting is doomed.It’s not.While the handwringing and emotions are at an all-time high, the case for handwriting is stronger than ever, too. Sure, some of the attachment is nostalgia. In the US, there’s even a weird sense that knowing cursive is some sort of civic duty for Americans. All of those arguments for handwriting overlook something: There are real benefits to learning to hold a pen in your hand and use it.US public schools still require that kids be taught handwriting, so it’s not yet a lost art, but there is some evidence that digital natives are less “ready” for writing now than students in the past, says Karen Ray, a lecturer in occupational therapy at the University of Newcastle in Australia. In 2021, Ray coauthored a study ex...