Students of my generation have much to lose if we don’t bring the dying art of handwriting back into the classroom.
Cara Landry, the protagonist of Andrew Clement’s children’s book The Landry News, started a newspaper at her school. Inspired by her, my fourth-grade classmates and I launched the Germantown Gazette, complete with updates on the rat that had recently been spotted in the homeroom down the hall, editorials about our uncomfortable uniforms, and hand-drawn Garfield comics. I contributed a then-controversial piece advocating for a longer school day, though without any homework. Because we didn’t know how to format newspaper columns, we wrote each page by hand and then photocopied them. While assembling the issues was quite laborious, I felt pride in the final product.
Now the final product is less precious to me than the memory of creating it; it’s one of my last childhood memories of writing by hand. In third grade, my teacher sidelined our cursive lesson for a how-to on iPads, and my handwriting education was over. Today, as a junior in high school, I can only write lowercase cursive letters because I’m expected to complete all my school assignments digitally.
Handwriting is a practice that allows us to be more deliberate and creative, while helping us comprehend, store, and retrieve information. Especially for the “Zoom school” kids of my generation, handwriting can serve as a powerful antidote to our overstimulated tech world, where our fried dopamine receptors struggle to sit with anything, undistracted, for longer than the length of an Instagram reel.
The concept of handwriting resurfaced last year, when I ran for student council and half-jokingly asserted that my handwriting, with its round, consistent lettering, constituted indisputable evidence of my thoroughness and drive. While I don’t necessarily buy into this form of personality analysis, it got me thinking: my own “font” wasn’t just a mode of writing, but a personal expression that typeface couldn’t capture.
I was never required to handwrite anything in school, so I began writing by hand at home, for fifteen minutes each morning. Filling a notebook with anything my groggy mind could churn out became a meditative routine, allowing me to keep track of, reflect on, and even problem-solve issues in my life. What I thought were world-ending problems seemed more manageable once laid out on the page in my own hand.
It turns out my experience writing in a notebook matches the research about the scientific benefits of handwriting. Using a pen activates parts of the brain associated with learning and promotes connectivity between brain regions.
Even today, many prominent thinkers, leaders, and authors swear to the benefits of handwriting for exploring and thinking through ideas. Barack Obama, in the preface to his autobiography, shares that he wrote everything in longhand first, because “a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness.”
Aside from being blissfully free of pop-up notifications, writing by hand has been scientifically proven to offer the kind of benefits Obama describes. When we write by hand, the sensorimotor processes—the physical act of writing out each character—activate and link multiple brain regions, including those responsible for memory, attention, and retention. This helps us become better critical thinkers and learners. The tactile and spatiotemporal procedure of writing in paper notebooks also improves accuracy and confidence in information retention and recall. According to recent studies, students who take notes on a laptop learn less because they can disconnect mentally and simply transcribe lectures, whereas the slower process of handwriting requires reframing ideas into your own words.
A surprising source of hope is that efforts to prevent students from overrelying on AI, like ChatGPT, may pave the way for reintroducing handwriting into the classroom. At my school, some classes have already started making the transition toward more handwriting-heavy work. In history class, the syllabus hit us with something I hadn’t seen in years: a mandatory checklist of notebooks to purchase. Latin requires heavy note-taking, as I hurriedly write down each of Horace’s metonymies. During the first week of my semester-long English elective on masculine identity, our teacher surprised us when he told us to put our tablets away because we would have to write our essays on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by hand. Fortunately, one student had brought a notebook and tore out page after page to share with the rest of us.
Teachers should plan more such activities, encourage students to develop study habits that require active processing, and incentivize handwriting outside of the classroom. During advisory periods, advisors should set aside time for students to journal and reflect in notebooks.
Skeptics may argue that in our modern world, digital literacy is more important than handwriting, and neglecting technology in the curriculum hinders students’ development of those crucial skills. However, there is little chance that tech-enabled learning will go away anytime soon. Learning handwriting in parallel promotes learning and skills that can be applied to digital contexts.
Writing about The Road, I found myself pausing to think about where to go next. When a new idea didn’t come to me right away, I felt a wave of anxiety overcome me, together with an itching in my fingers. Habit told me to hit the keyboard, to type something, anything. Then I was reminded of a quote I read from Clement, the author of The Landry News: “You don’t have to do everything at once. You don’t have to know how every story is going to end. You just have to take that next step, look for that next idea, write that next word.”
I wrote the next word. Then the next. At first, it felt like my fingers were cramping, yet I kept going. After a few more strokes, it became easier. Soon enough, it felt like gliding across ice.