Handwriting

The moment my English teacher called out to the class that we were having a "work period" an entire hour to write our assignments, everyone reached into their bags, in a pocket that was made specifically for a sleek, thin computer, and pulled out their laptops. Booting them up, I watched silently as almost all of the class had their fancy portable computers on their desk, and began typing. The tops of the laptops were all facing me, their logos popping out from their black or sliver canvas. From where I was working, I saw only an inkling, a handful of people who, like me, had their pencils out and were scribbling on lined pieces of paper.

Ever since kindergarten, children are taught how to write by hand, tracing dotted lines to form As and Bs. We would scribble in small notebooks with huge spacing between ruling lines about what we did on the weekend. With wobbly and shaking handwriting, one could barely make out a "I like pears" under a picture of said fruit. Still, every year, we would get new notebooks that we filled with notes and lessons and every year, our handwriting would have subtle differences.

However, with the new age of technology, handwriting seems to be becoming less and less practical. We are using emails, texts and other forms of social media more and more regularly and now much of the school curriculum revolves around the use of these new technologies. Now, schools are all equipped with Dell laptops in a large black cart and sometimes even Apple computers. More and more people are now wondering if handwriting will become obsolete.

Many schools today are opting to exclude teaching cursive to the students. Many argue that it is useless, as students will never use these skill outside of school as no one really writes with cursive nowadays. The time spent on learning cursive could instead be used on other subjects that are more suitable for the modern era and keyboarding lessons could supersede lessons on cursive. After all, in this era of fast growing technology, keyboarding would be a much more important skill than cursive.

However, cursive writing isn't that impotent. Cursive writing elevates the speed people can write and thus it creates a sense of automaticity and the brain can spend more time on sentence structure and organization. This spontaneousness is also important when transferring information from the brain's short-term memory to its long-term memory. Students who work on tablets and computers do not develop these skills as instead of memorizing the spelling of the individual words, many spell it out phonetically and the auto-correct feature in these programs gives them the correct spelling.

Often in peer editing situations, I find mistakes in my spelling after getting my assignment returned from a classmate. After pointing out the mistake, they would often look incredulous and state that they had thought that was the correct spelling.

People also stress over how messy their handwriting. They state that because their handwriting is so illegible, it would be better for them to type than to actually write their assignment. Yet, some teachers find that students have a hard time reading their written feedback. Many of my teachers prefer to hand notes back with a comment, written in cursive, which prompts many students to have to go up and ask the educator about the the comment which hinders communication and learning of the student. However, students who do practice cursive and handwriting more often have less difficulty reading the criticism or remark of their teachers.

Handwriting is a unique part of ourselves in this age of technology, handwriting is still as potent as ever. It forms part of our culture and some say that it is even an art. Even though we have more keyboards, the fact remains that handwriting is beneficial to learning and creativity.