Chapter 13
Research on the cognitive superiority of writing by hand over typing on a keyboard is all fairly recent, with scattered studies done to test a phalanx of different issues: literacy acquisition, speed of writing, test scores, and reading comprehension. There is no convincing empirical evidence that handwriting is cognitively superior to keyboarding, although some make that claim.
Scientific American published an article in 2013 titled “The Science of Handwriting” in which the only verifiable proof the author found is that people with brain lesions that make handwriting difficult also have difficulty recognizing letters. The rest of the “science” is pretty fuzzy, as the author, Brandon Keim, admits. Virginia Berninger, who calls the hand “the end organ of the language system,” is cited in Keim’s article. Berninger conducted a study that found students who could write the alphabet legibly and quickly had higher spelling and composition scores than those who could not, suggesting that good handwriting leads to better reading comprehension and writing ability. But she admits her findings are provisional and “need to be replicated.” No comparable study has been done to analyze the scores of students who type quickly. Marieke Longcamp did a research study following established scientific protocols that showed people remembered letters better if they wrote them than if they typed them. However, Longcamp’s study involved only a “few dozen” participants. Keim concludes his piece by doing his own experiment. Having written it longhand, “I can report, in this non-conclusive, N of 1 study, with no controls or standardized metrics or objective behavioral outcomes, that writing by hand felt good, even right.”
Many people feel the same: Handwriting feels right. But that is due to our backgrounds and associations—almost all Americans alive today were taught to make letters with pencils in school. This has been true only for a few generations, though. Most humans over the long course of history never developed such associations, and thus have no childhood associations to make it “feel good” to write longhand.
There is conclusive science about reading acquisition: Reading does alter the brain. Once a person becomes literate and does not have to sound out letters, the brain is freed “from the effort of decoding—perhaps more so with an alphabet than with any other writing system—people are freed to think more, and to generate new thoughts.” 1 Although humans were not “wired” for reading, once they invented it, neuronal pathways that were designed for vision and for other, related functions—like inferring that a footprint could mean danger—were used for reading. Writing further expanded the brain, according to Maryanne Wolf. “With each of the new writing systems, with their different increasingly sophisticated demands, the brain’s circuitry rearranged itself, causing our repertoire of intellectual capacities to grow and change in great, wonderful leaps of thoughts.”
But it is not a straight line of progress. Wolf, as noted in an earlier chapter, argues that ancient Egyptian writers may have evolved further than any other culture due to the complexity of their system. And those who learn Chinese develop different neuronal connections than do English writers. Even small differences matter, according to Wolf, whose research finds that brains process capital letters in a different neurological way than they do lowercase letters.
Each individual person’s development follows somewhat this same evolutionary trend, just much, much more quickly. As Wolf puts it, “It took 2000 years to get from Sumer to Greek alphabet, but we expect our children to master it in 2000 days.”2 The linguist Steven Pinker uses another analogy: “Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.”3
The key neurological function that we want to bolt into children’s brains is cognitive automaticity, the ability to write without consciously being aware one is doing it. When the brain has automatized the slopes of letters or their place on a keyboard, it is freed from low-level demands. Ellie, the second grader discussed in the introduction, who finds both handwriting and typing hard, has not achieved cognitive automaticity in either. Once she does, her writing will improve, because two-thirds of composing is planning, regardless of the tool.4 Psychology professor Ronald T. Kellogg, in The Psychology of Writing, states that “the tool choice makes no difference in determining how well a writer composes.” Nor do people think better with a pen than on a keyboard: “This may be true for some writers at inspired moments or for those using a free-writing strategy, but as a general rule, it seems highly suspect. Planning and translating are generally highly effortful, controlled operations that proceed too slowly in general, not too rapidly, for the pen to match the pace.” 5
By fourth grade, Ellie will likely achieve cognitive automaticity whether she is using a pen or a keyboard. If she is typical, cursive will be her toughest challenge, and if she does not master cursive by fourth grade because of fine motor skills or other issues, she will continue to struggle with it—and never achieve cognitive automaticity in cursive—for the rest of her life.
If that happens, she will receive lower grades in school, because students with poor handwriting receive worse scores on tests and essays. According to Steve Graham, Mary Emily Warner Professor in the Division of Leadership and Innovation in the Teachers College of Arizona State University, teachers grade neatly written essays higher than less legible papers, what he calls the “handwriting effect”: “Teachers form judgments, positive or negative, about the literary merit of text based on its overall legibility,” he finds. “When teachers rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in terms of legibility, they assign higher grades to neatly written versions of the paper than the same versions with poorer penmanship.” In another study done by the College Board, those who chose cursive over printing received higher scores.6 Even further up the educational ladder, students can be unfairly assessed: Some college courses require blue-book exams, which must be handwritten.
There is no science that proves handwriting makes students smarter; further, typing clearly has a democratizing effect, removing unconscious bias against students with poor handwriting, and leveling the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage. Everyone is graded on the same curve. Odds are Ellie will be faster at typing than at writing by hand by the fourth grade, and she will rarely need to handwrite in school and work as she grows up. But she might choose to anyway.