Handwriting!

During my school days there was significant focus on handwriting. I vividly remember that there were 5 extra marks given until about the secondary classes for legible writing and neat handwriting. Teachers actively encouraged good handwriting and perhaps even liked those students with good handwriting a bit more than the rest. The same for Parents, to the extent that handwriting was some sort of an identity. Everyone took pride if they got identified with the flourish of their handwriting and somehow at an impressionable age that caught our fancy as well. There used to be trivia on guessing yesteryears’ public figures from their hand-written scripts and publication of letters in their original form of famous personalities is still a collector’s item.

Needless to say the situation is different now. When did you last hand write anything more than a few lines long? How comfortable are you to write a four A4-page long composition anymore? How pleased are you with your handwriting even when you are doing a simple task like writing a cheque or filling up an insurance form? For me atleast, it’s a NO to all these questions! I can argue that I don’t have a need to write anymore. Computers and smartphones have made handwriting almost unnecessary or rather irrelevant. Pride in handwriting today holds no significance. Maybe to our child yes, but to the outside world no. Hence, it does hurt to think that with the advent of technology we have perhaps lost one of our key individual identities. Everyone, even kids, write using computers and there’s no identity or visible distinction between your writing and mine. There is no personal touch or identity visible through any documents or letters anymore. One may argue that there is still individuality in everyone’s style of writing. But, with autocorrect features and language editing tools in word processing software, we are herded to write in a similar style. Some suggest that getting the “i before e except after c” often wrong, give an individuality to some. Same for striking through the zero, a dash over 7 or a small circle instead of a dot over i and j. Is it?

Psychologists have long understood that personal, emotion-focused writing can help people recognize and come to terms with their feelings. Since the 1980s, studies have found that “the writing cure,” which normally involves writing about one’s feelings every day for 15 to 30 minutes, can lead to measurable physical and mental health benefits. These benefits include everything from lower stress and fewer depression symptoms to improved immune function. And there’s evidence that handwriting may better facilitate this form of therapy than typing. A 1999 study in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that writing about a stressful life experience by hand, as opposed to typing about it, led to higher levels of self-disclosure and translated to greater therapeutic benefits. Writing by hand also improve a person’s memory for new information. A 2017 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that brain regions associated with learning are more active when people completed a task by hand, as opposed to on a keyboard. The authors of that study say writing by hand may promote “deep encoding” of new information in ways that keyboard writing does not. And other researchers have argued that writing by hand promotes learning and cognitive development in ways keyboard writing can’t match. A 2014 study in the journal Psychological Science found that students who took notes in longhand tested higher on measures of learning and comprehension than students who took notes on laptops.

There’s also a mountain of research that suggests online forms of communication are more toxic than offline dialogue. Most of the researchers who study online communication speculate that a lack of face-to-face interaction and a sense of invisibility are to blame for the nasty and brutish quality of many online interactions. The impersonal nature of keyboard-generated text may also, in some small way, be contributing to the observed toxicity. When a person writes by hand, they invest more time and energy than they would with a keyboard. And handwriting, unlike typed text, is unique to everyone. Therefore, people usually value a handwritten note more highly than an email or text. If words weren’t quite so easy to produce, it’s possible that people would treat them - and maybe each other - with a little more care. The irony is I am typing all of this on my computer. I wish I could write as I used to during my teens, but I am fully aware of my inability to do so anymore. That worries me. But I have lived half (hopefully) of my life already. What about those millions of children who will perhaps never ever handwrite, now that online form of education is becoming so pervasive? Time and generations will tell whether it helped humankind to move forward. Till then, I will try to get back my handwriting. Will you? #Handwriting