Is there a place for handwriting in a digital world?

Handwriting is educational marmite; as teachers, we love it or we loathe it entirely. Regardless of our personal standpoints, it is a key principle that features in every year group within the Primary National Curriculum. Ergo, we teach it — but, in an increasingly digital world, can handwriting justify its place in the curriculum? KassiElla Rankine believes that it can.

As Neil Almond details in his episode of the ‘Thinking Deeply About Primary Education’ podcast, there are many underlying prerequisites that are needed for handwriting, such as fine motor skills, postural control, knowledge of letters and directionality. With that in mind, it’s reasonable to question why we bother putting our children through the hardship of learning to handwrite, especially if they’ll then spend the rest of their lives typing everything. Even personalised birthday cards can be ordered off Moonpig without needing to pick up a pen. Is there a ‘point’ to handwriting anymore?

The short answer: yes. Here at stylus, we see handwriting still worthy of its spot in the curriculum. There is value — great value, in fact — in spending time on handwriting. Here’s why.

The memory of 18-year-old me in the thick of her A Level exams, sitting on her childhood bedroom floor surrounded by hand-written notes about The Cold War, comes back to haunt me from time to time. This study strategy was one that followed me into my university years, where the thought of entering a lecture hall without a notebook in hand was simply unheard of. On the odd occasion that I thought I might branch out and type my notes, I found myself transcribing them into my notebook later that same day; my brain couldn’t seem to retain any new information when typing. Fast forward to my teacher training and the keyboard took a firm back seat.

It’s undeniable — there’s just something so ‘je ne sais quoi’ about putting pen to paper. Of course, this feeling alone isn’t grounds for squeezing yet another ‘non-negotiable’ into an over-crowded timetable. That’s where the science comes in. Research from both cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggest that handwriting is a fundamental part of the learning process — one that a keyboard cannot replace.

Before diving into the research, I would like to acknowledge and thank Neil Almond for making the creation of this article possible. Neil has done extensive research in this area and, as such, did a lot of the legwork for what follows.

What do the neuroscientists say?

I've always been convinced that I both remember and understand new information better when I make handwritten notes — but I couldn't tell you why. As it turns out, neuroscientists can. There is empirical evidence to show that our brains respond differently to writing by hand when compared to typing. A study conducted by Ose et al. (2020) on 12 twelve-year-old children found that writing and drawing by hand showed “synchronised activity” in the parietal region (home to the brain’s sensory area) within the theta range (brain activity associated with memory and learning). Simply put, the sensory experience of using a pen rather than a keyboard activated the process of learning.

An earlier study by James and Engelhardt (2012) conducted on ten pre-literate children discovered that writing by hand (tracing) opposed to typing activated the “visual areas used in letter processing and the motor regions of letter production.” Let’s not forget — at the same time as children are learning to write, they are also learning to read. Their ability to recognise letters in lower and uppercase as well as both individually and at word level is something that evolves through the process of learning to decode. Seeing these formations on a keyboard rather than using the motor functions required to create these strokes and/or shapes themselves creates a disassociation between the two areas of reading and writing which, as educators, is a problem that we would want to avoid at all costs.

What do the cognitive psychologists say?

Neuroscientific research suggests that the parts of our brain associated with encoding new information are activated when we put pen to paper. Further research from cognitive psychology takes this argument one step further by suggesting that writing performance is greater when handwritten. One study from Malpique, et al. (2023) found that, amongst 6,000 primary-aged children, handwriting was significantly correlated with better quality passages when compared with keyboarding.

Research from McCutchen (1996) proposes that writing fluency (number of words per minute) has a significant impact on composition. If a child’s working memory isn’t taken up by the process of handwriting (because it’s become automatic — hence, fluency), it frees up space to consider the content and structure of what they are writing instead. I know from my own teaching experience that the children who are putting all of their efforts into the formation of their letters tend to then not have the mental capacity to generate a quality piece of writing. Some schools combat this barrier with the use of technology, be it touch typing or speech-to-text software, but it seems to me that a more obvious solution would be to dedicate more time on handwriting instruction in the first place.

In a similar vein, we know that a child’s working memory can be taken up by the process of spelling — but can you imagine a world in which a school opted to substitute the teaching of spelling for technology that can spell for their pupils? Instead, educators respond to this obstacle by prioritising the teaching of spelling across the Primary stage instead. How does a child become fluent at spelling? Exposure and practice. How does a child become fluent in their times tables? Exposure and practice. How does a child become fluent at writing? You guessed it — exposure and practice.

The Presentation Effect

One argument often made for deprioritising the teaching of handwriting is the infamous ‘Presentation Effect’: the notion that neater handwriting creates better quality prose. As such, your judgment may be solely based upon the appearance of a piece of writing rather than its content. Some may argue that keyboarding would eradicate this issue and level the playing field.

Of course, in an ideal world, we would hope that our handwriting lessons generate beautiful, cursive handwriters — but, realistically, that shouldn’t be our aim. Handwriting doesn’t need to be neat; it needs to be legible. If a piece of writing is difficult to read, this will inevitably lead to a lower grade. However, as long as we can decode the information presented to us then we need to avoid making snap judgments based on its neatness level. Neil Almond suggests that this is an area where AI can be genuinely useful in the world of education as it removes the subjective judgment ‘trap’ that humans find tricky not to fall into.

Handwriting in the ‘bigger picture’ of education

Such findings as discussed above raise an eyebrow towards our rush to ‘tap into tech’. As educators, our raison d'être is to create truly great writers and it doesn’t appear that the digital pen is the correct approach. Contrary to popular belief, the evidence seems to point us back towards the trusty analogue pen. As useful as technology can be within education, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Beyond the arguments rooted in technology and science, there is a bigger question to be asked about the role of education before all else — does society shape what we teach or does what we teach shape society? As educators, we are naturally preparing the children in our care for the society they are about to enter but it is also our job to teach these children to become the adults our society needs. A functioning society is only as good as the quality of its education. From the first marks scratched on cave walls to George Orwell’s handwritten 1984 manuscript, the (hand)written word is a common thread uniting humans across millennia. Poetry, art, music — all of these, too, can be replaced by technology, but it is up to us to decide if they should be. Put simply, do we want to live in a society without handwriting? Let's water the grass where we want it to grow.

Find out more about how to submit your hand-written pieces to us at stylus, where we provide AI-powered marking and feedback using nothing but paper.