Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing"s on the wall | Andrew Brown

‘There’s no contact for handwriting in most jobs these days, any much more than there is any requirement for independent thought’ … Andrew Brown’s scrawl. Photograph: Andrew Brown

Swedish schools are thinking about no matter whether to abandon the educating of handwriting. They will continue to educate block capitals, but the subtleties of cursive writing will no longer be transmitted outside the elite. This would seem to me to lose a single of the most wonderful cognitive tools ever invented. Handwriting helps you feel. The physicality of it helps make the connected psychological processes clearer and more memorable.

This type of argument is quite wasted on educational bureaucrats, for whom the question is regardless of whether children can learn to variety more rapidly and a lot more clearly than they can write by hand. Right after all, there is no phone for handwriting in most jobs nowadays, any a lot more than there is any necessity for independent imagined.

I never consider there is any doubt that a educated typist can type faster and much more legibly than it is achievable to compose in longhand. Nor have I ever identified any type of handwriting program that lets me talk rapidly and accurately with a personal computer. The nearest point would be the phone keyboards that let you slide a finger about them as an alternative of striking individual letters. In any case, they lack all distinctiveness. That is an asset if you are feeding into machines. But the stage of handwriting is not to communicate with machines. In some sense it’s not even a implies of communication with other men and women. It is useful simply because it distances us from machines, and helps make our output the two far more precise and less predictable.

There is so a lot much more encoded in a handwritten page than in something typewritten. The archives of metadata that Google or the NSA can collect about our words can not match the variety and depth of associations that my handwriting reveals to me. It might not be obvious to any individual else, but the purpose of personal imagined is not quickly to be shared.

Handwriting is the expression of all people facets of character that are not able to be shared or even glimpsed on Facebook. Handwriting is what I turn to when I want to learn imagined – the pen, like a divining rod, moves in my hand in the direction of anything I can only come to feel and not however see.

This is partly since it is so much more complex an action than typing. That looks like a disadvantage, but we are bodily, embodied creatures, and need to use muscle tissues when we think appropriately. Just as strolling is much greater than sitting nevertheless if you want to perform out a challenging issue, so does the varied co-ordination necessary to write cursively drive considered more efficiently than just moving fingers up and down on to the keys.

It also captures the disconnected and chaotic methods in which real imagined emerges. A handwritten webpage can have loops, insertions, deletions and marginalia in approaches that pc application really finds difficult to emulate. It operates against the false simplistic certainties of PowerPoint and for that explanation alone is a ability that all democracies must teach.

My own handwriting is minor utilised now. I even now maintain a pen and pad of paper on the creating desk for when I get caught and have to come to feel my way via a hard passage. And only a hand-scrawled web page or 3 of A4 can capture the glorious and nearly dreaming exuberance of believed that often anticipates the day’s initial cup of coffee. But I am the only person who ever reads or tries to go through what I compose that way. Handwriting as a mode of communication with other people is practically dead.

My father had a firm, clear hand. He belonged to a generation in which all important selections had been conveyed in handwriting, and typing was a specialised manual skill, so he essential to be read by other folks. I once discovered his notes on a Foreign Office document in the Public Data Workplace in Kew, and the firm neat downstrokes had hardly altered at all from people of the letters he wrote to me forty many years later on. I see them in my very own hand now: the marks of a Belfast protestant temperament, even though the loops and swinging trails are all my very own.

Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing"s on the wall | Andrew Brown