Hey. Yeah, you there. When was the last time you saw a kid picking up a pencil to confide in a diary?
Huh, what a coincidence; that’s what I said, too. Probably at least ten years ago.
We once wept for the loss of quills and scrolls, for the era of dark blooming ink and lamplight drawn low. Now, we clutch our murdered tree paper and mechanical pencils, sidling along the precipice of a cliff that drops away into the abyss of keyboards and screens.
Long ago, the ancient Roman poet Horace stated, “The pen is the tongue of the mind.” However, we have opted for the preconceived notion that typing is a faster and more efficient way of writing. Is this really true, though?
For one, physical writing has been proven time and time again to facilitate higher brain connectivity compared to that of typing. One aspect of this is the tactile, coordinated movements itself. By harmonizing visual and motor systems, you have already activated your mind far more than the simple tapping of keys on a screen or board.
A study conducted in January 2024 revealed that “comparatively, coupled with visual perception, normal handwriters are more motor-based, i.e., they mobilize more upper-limb coordination, unimanual dexterity or fine-motor skills, all of which can help them to minimise or even optimise extraneous cognitive load.”
Another benefit of the longstanding practice of handwriting is its relation to literacy and learning fundamental letters of the alphabet.
Research by Sophia Vinci-Booher, a professor of neuroscience at Vanderbilt University, supports the idea that children can recognize letters more effectively when exposed to diverse handwritten examples as opposed to uniform typed ones. This exposure then strengthens brain regions involved in reading as they grow older.
The merits of handwriting don’t stop there. According to a 2024 article by NPR, “For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down … The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas.”
Before this goes on for too long, I’ll stop here. However, it’s obvious that the abandonment of handwriting culture will soon be evident as a blight upon our society.
We have already begun to witness the effects of a typing and screen-oriented lifestyle: the glazed-over eyes and uncouth mouths of seemingly wholesome six-year-olds.
There’s something sickening about seeing a bunch of children at the park, sitting under the shade of an oak tree, furiously tapping away at a host of iPads instead of doodling together in drawing pads or writing in a top-secret diary.
Loss of culture, loss of capability, loss of creativity. Clearly, we are living in the contemporary retelling of a Greek tragedy: the usurping of the pen and paper.
