Why Handwriting Is History

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Today’s idea: Handwriting is dying because it’s a slow and inefficient way of getting our thoughts out — a hindrance to thinking, given the alternatives, an essay says.

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Culture | “When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one,” writes Anne Trubek in Miller-McCune magazine. “Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.”

But Trubek, an Oberlin College professor, looks askance at such sentimentality, and differs with those would like to see handwriting reinvigorated in schools. Educators often err in linking good handwriting with smarts, she says — a bias that carries over to the scoring of the new written portion of the SAT.

Surveying the evolution of writing methods from Sumerian cuneiform to A.N. Palmer’s script to the qwerty keyboard, Trubek concludes:

The moral of the story is that what we want from writing … is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. … This is what Palmer wanted for his students — speed. This is what the typewriter promised Twain. This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.

Trubek adds: “Whatever we use to write, there will be a shortfall between conception and execution, between the ideas in our heads and the words we produce. We often insert nostalgia into this gap.” [ Miller-McCune]

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Vincent Lacey December 23, 2009 · 6:52 am

Handwriting will always be with me. I can’t go one day without hand writing something in my journal. I still feel the connection between pen and paper. Even if it is slower than typing I prefer it. There is something a little more personal with handwriting.

Aaron Shannon December 23, 2009 · 7:04 am

Well, I’ll take history then. Say what you will about it, handwriting still works when the electricity is off.

MH McGrath December 23, 2009 · 7:05 am

The author is wrong. Handwriting gives us time to think! Too fast typing (and worse yet, too fast thinking!) gives us no time to think well. Today, our thoughtless drivel is out there for everyone to ignore. I still use fountain pens because even the act of filling the pen gives me some more time to think. Let’s not give up on the thoughtful, and personal, approach to writing – by hand. We can type it up later – after we’ve had some time to think about it.

Mightier than the sword. December 23, 2009 · 7:05 am

I’m handwriting my comment and sending it by mail.

Charles Hoyenski December 23, 2009 · 7:09 am

I was tutoring a local college kid who was going to school
here in Austin a few years back, a former GI and very intelligent, but he did not know how to write in longhand, albeit “script”, I was stunned when he showed me a paper he had written for review that was done entirely in block letters, I asked him if he knew how to write in long hand ?, he replied that they did not teach it to him in his native state of North Carolina, but he had been introduced to computers at an early age.
So it goes: Kids don’t know how to spell because of programs like word, they can’t do simple math because of the prevelance of calculators, they no longer write words out in long hand because they use computers instead, but what’s most disturbing is “texting” this has bastardized the
english language with abbreviations and slang that is truly degrading to the language and is dumbing down our kids.
At least if your going to use technology to communicate, use a querty keyboard !.

Sam December 23, 2009 · 7:23 am

I suspect that Doktor Trubek either has psychological issues dating back to her hatred of her penmanship teacher at age 9, or has too much time on her hands.

Paul Mills December 23, 2009 · 7:28 am

Notably, writing on an iPhone, which does not have a keyboard that one can feel without looking, returns us to the slower pace of handwriting – of verifying each letter before moving on to the next.

peter December 23, 2009 · 7:37 am

create the capability that I can use a stylist on my computer screen and the handwriting will appear in this space as my comments, and I will use it to comment.

Larry Eisenberg December 23, 2009 · 7:48 am

The holographic letter, it seems,
Is a relic, reflecting past dreams,
Emails, looking the same,
Carry no shame or blame,
Bring on more impersonal schemes.

ACW December 23, 2009 · 7:51 am

Trubek is absolutely wrong. Actually, the exact opposite is true. Slowing down one’s process of writing (and of revising) lends itself to reflection, analysis, and ultimately higher-quality thought.

I wrote better by hand than by typewriter, because I made my first round of edits with the traditional copy editor’s marks, then made additional edits when I had to recopy by hand. Now, working by computer, I no longer have to retype a paragraph – just cut and paste. The edits I would have made in the old system of recopying or retyping just don’t get made – it’s “faster,” but instead of allowing me to work at the speed of thought, it has allowed me to bypass thought altogether.

Read any comment thread from the NYTimes (or better – or rather, worse – yet, go to a comment thread somewhere like Yahoo) and tell me that the ability to spit forth one’s thoughts as fast as one has them has actually improved the quality, either in content or language.

Fast thought is like fast food, and mere velocity has no relation either to the a worthwhile destination or the pleasure of the trip.

Jenny December 23, 2009 · 7:52 am

I think she is missing some crucial elements and that is the expressiveness in the writing. Not merely what graphologists look at but the art of penmanship. Actually, a very interesting discussion on how penmanship and expressionist typing are adapting themselves to the digital age: //www.pandalous.com/topic/penmanship_and

rationalpursuit December 23, 2009 · 7:53 am

But thoughts that occur at speed are not always thoughts that are considered, edited, and improved. Students who type their lecture notes in class let the information in their ears and out their fingers, without the extra processing, the deep encoding that is necessary to catch the main point when one doesn’t have time to capture all the words the lecturer used to convey it. Typing is certainly superior for many things, but the inability to convey information legibly without a keyboard is crippling.

Dennis Geller December 23, 2009 · 7:57 am

I wonder if Mr. Emmons (or Professor Trubek) made any notes on a piece of paper before writing this article?. Perhaps he took a shopping list to the grocery store (or mall)? Has he ever thought to write a thank-you note for some gift?

Yes handing in a handwrittenr final paper at a top-line college like Oberlin is rather passe. But there are plenty of high school students who don’t have easy access to computers, but still need to take notes in class, grind out those five paragraph essays, and do those math problems. Ever try doing your math homework in work processor?

“Handwriting is history” in the same way that hand calculation is history. I have nice, normal, upper-middle class students who pull out their calculator to find 6 divided by 3. They hand in work that is illegible even to themselves, judging by the number of errors due to mis-reading. And if it seems that they can’t write competent sentences, or spell, perhaps that’s because touch-typing is designed to let the fingers do the work, reserving the higher cortical centers for more important concerns, like listening to music. We stopped teaching them to add because they’d have calculators. Now we’re to stop teaching them to write because they have keypads.

I don’t embrace luddite-ism (I worked for many years in high tech R&D before moving into to teach high school). But I do know that every technology has its limits, and that the time we can replace all of the marvelous things writing does for us has definitely not arrived.

karen lyons kalmenson December 23, 2009 · 8:06 am

there is far too many a slip
between legibility
and my penmanship
however i think
that if indeed
i started to tweet
even that noone
could read

a doctor’s rx
not to be read
but now doesnt matter
with obamacare
medicine is dead

Nancy Gleason December 23, 2009 · 8:06 am

There is no question that the computer has revolutionized our ability to put down and share ideas and I agree that it’s the most efficient way to communicate for commercial and academic purposes. However, which of us don’t smile when we get hand-written cards and letters in the mail? I think it’s because we appreciate the time others take to hand write their thoughts, look up our address, put a stamp on the envelope and have it hand-delivered to our door. I’ve started a one-woman campaign to keep the post office in business by mailing a card or letter to someone every day and mailing packages through the Post Office when there’s time. Can you imagine never getting a card or letter in the mail? If not, please join me in the “Mail A Hand-Written Card or Letter A Day” campaign. It will make you and someone else feel great!

Andy December 23, 2009 · 8:10 am

The ability to write without the aid of a machine is a fundamental human capability, right up there with conscious thought, not a quaint nostalgic “technology.”

Paul Hoss December 23, 2009 · 8:11 am

Amazingly enough, there are many elementary school teachers still trying to keep the Palmer/Rhinehart methods alive and well, even at the cost of stealing precious instructional time from English language arts, math, science, social studies, etc. Education reform? These teachers need a good wake up call and an accompanying welcome into the twenty-first century.

Ken Pittsburgh December 23, 2009 · 8:14 am

Typing gives less time to think. We’re thinking about the next sentence before we’ve had time to consider the last as it will look to the reader.

dan e. bloom December 23, 2009 · 8:25 am

So when we “write” or “compose” as the icon says on email screens or when we blog, are we “writing” or “composing” or “keying in” or “keyboarding” or “typing”? What do we call this new kind of writing we do on screens? Why does the email prompt say “compose” instead of “write message” or just “:write”? Are we really composing online now, not writing? Just asking….

Morris K. December 23, 2009 · 8:27 am

As a veteran copy editor and proofreader, I would be more than happy to see longhand penmanship relegated to museums and archives. The only time I ever use it myself is when writing checks or signing documents, and even there my hand often stumbles, forcing me to start over. The undecipherable scribbling that passes for handwriting is the editor’s bane — it’s bad enough sorting through ungrammatical language and making it integral, but having to puzzle out exactly what characters the writer is attempting to use is a wholly unnecessary burden on the manuscript reader. Worse yet are letter writers who toss out long tomes of illegible verbiage that leave the missives’ recipients scratching their heads in bewilderment. I quickly learned, when obliged to write notes on copy myself, that the surest way to convey my intentions, without any possibility of being misunderstood, is to revert to the style of writing we all learned in the earliest grades — namely, to print in block lettering, with none of the confusing running together of cursives that merely obfuscates rather than clarifies.

Eric, Maine December 23, 2009 · 8:29 am

I spend just as much time thinking about what i type as what I write, probably because I’m not a fast typist. I have no doubt that my typed compositions are just as well thought out as my written ones.

I could never type as a way of taking notes, though – you can’t underline a phrase four times, or snake an arrow through half a page.

I would really like it if I could read my twelve year old’s handwriting, though. I don’t know how his teachers do it. He appears completely unconcerned about it.

JB December 23, 2009 · 8:30 am

OK fine.

But only if please start using some of their newly available time to actually read, refine, and edit their quickly composed initial thoughts.

A lot of first drafts are never meant to see the light of day. It takes work to home syntax, sentence structure, cadence, and tone.

Mike December 23, 2009 · 8:32 am

I have been thinking very similar thoughts about this topic in the last few months. A few months ago I read an article about how cursive was a dying art form and now your article on “Why Handwriting is History”: I would take this idea to even a deeper level, as we continute to get faster, better, and more reliant on the digital format, what will happen to our modern digital history 100 years or more from now. What if some global event happens and our computers are no longer accessable or we get to the point that we can no longer access our “Royal Library of Alexandria” that we now have in the internet. Would be become a lost civilation with only “Oral” History or traditions and rituals left to define us as a culture? Or how easy would it be for us to be as the Mayan civilazation were most of their written history was distroyed by an invading force? Who needs mass book burnings when all someone has to do is turn off the power.

Great article I’ll be sure to recommend it.

MadMike December 23, 2009 · 8:37 am

Typing is convenient only if you have a typewriter or a computer handy and maybe not even then. If you want to talk about the speed of communication, which seems to be the primary assertion of the essay, then you must acknowledge that writing is so much faster than typing that we ought to give up teaching typing all together.

It takes over 2 minutes for me just to boot my laptop, and another minute to get some type of WP program to open. In those same 3 minutes, I can open my (paper) notebook, hand write a two page estimate for a construction job, give it to the customer, have them SIGN it, and give me a deposit check to start the job. My “faster communicating” competitors add only one thing to the job by typing, and that is cost.

With regards to allowing students to take notes with a laptop, I find that to be reprehensible. In engineering school, I never would have learned as much as I did if I hadn’t taken physical notes with a pen during my classes. As pointed out by an earlier commenter, the brain does not process typing the same way as it does handwriting. Handwriting notes is what makes them stick in your brain. Furthermore, the vast majority of my note taking involved some sort of diagram. Reproducing those diagrams accurately on a computer in real time is nearly impossible, and if you were trying to type your notes you would miss the majority of the information. Switching back and forth between writing and diagramming is seamless with a pen, and takes forever with a computer. Is that handwriting? Not exactly, but handwriting teaches kids to be comfortable with a pen, and the pen is, in many ways, far mightier than the laptop.

There’s a time and a place for everything. The time for handwriting is far from over, and may never end. Accordingly, handwriting should still be taught in schools.

Daryl December 23, 2009 · 8:37 am

I can’t wait until text to speech replaces the keyboard.