People often credit My good writing to my Catholic school education – by nun with a sovereign and a taste for bodily punishment perfected my calligraphy. But that’s not why. It is because of my mother. Professional engineer, she can execute the type of perfect block letters which only as for years of work on a drawing board. As a child, I worked to imitate his print as well as his incredibly decorated cursive. I do not practice enough in adulthood: as a journalist, speed prevails over beauty when it comes to taking notes. Now, a large part of my work being done on a keyboard, I am even the scribble is in danger.

Mine is not an isolated donation. Parents, educators and colleagues defendants deplore the end of writing For years. The email began to ahead of cards and letters decades August. Then the smartphone hit the market, and our ridiculiance on paper notes, wall calendars and reminders after ETS have decreased. In American public schools, the emphasis has passed from writing to strikes, because more and more children are exposed to iPads and computers in tandem with pencils. And in recent years, AI has barely needed humans, and even less to note something. More than ever, it may seem that handwriting is condemned.

This is not the case.

Although the hands relay and emotions are at a record level, the case of handwriting is also stronger than ever. Of course, part of the attachment is nostalgia. In the United States, there is a strange feeling that knowledge of cursive is a kind of civic duty For Americans. All these arguments for manual writing ignore something: there are real advantages in learning to hold a pen in your socket and use it.

American public schools still demand that children learn handwriting, so it is not yet a lost art, but there is evidence that digital natives are less “ready” to write these studies now in the past, explains Karen Ray, lecturer in occupational therapy at Newcastle University in Australia. In 2021, Ray a co-author A study Examine whether children who grew up with devices had the same fine motor skills as children who did not do so. While these students reached the expected performance levels on manual dexterity tests, their global motor skills were lower than previous standards. Ultilly, the researchers have hypothesized, the time spent holding devices rather than pencils could have an impact on which children had all the motor skills they needed to learn writing when they enter the kindergarten.

But if children always have access to devices, is it really important that they can write with their hands? Yes and no. If the last years of nomadic digital coding and atmosphere have taught us at any time, it is that, professionally, handwriting may not be if necessary in many areas. The problem is that learning Writing may be necessary to learn everything else. “We do not know the year what we lose in terms of acquisition of literacy by de-identifying the mastery of writing,” explains Ray.

Among the experts at half-Dazen to whom I spoke for this play, there was a difference in opinion on the place where his moral panics about the teaching of writing were justified. For example, in many states, legislators have adopted Make sure children learn cursive to American public schools. Some experts support this, but many do not think that learning cursive, especially, is so important. But almost all agree that knowing how to write has cognitive advantages. This helps students learn to read, and it is likely that if they have to think about something long to write it, they will remember it in more detail than if it is typed.

“Writing itself is really important,” explains Robert Wiley, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, whose research focuses on how the brain treats written language. “Not in a sense of the Apsolute; people will not be illiterate. But some children will have more trouble learning because they lack this practice? Yes.”