It is easy to overlook the fact that even as technology creates more textual material than ever before in human history, less and less of it is handwritten. After all, what does it matter whether a text is carved into stone, scratched on to parchment or tapped into a qwerty keyboard? It’s all just text, isn’t it?
Actually, it does matter. And here’s why.
At its most fundamental, writing is about creating and articulating our thoughts through physical recorded expression to enable communication with others (or, indeed, with ourselves). This has evolved over time, of course, from cave paintings to chalk, pencil and ink. But I believe there is a critical difference for academics and students between these forms of handwriting and the current ubiquity of keyboards, predictive text and emojis – not to mention ChatGPT, which almost removes the need for writing at all.
Fundamentally, there is something about handwriting that enhances the creative flow essential for academic study and scholarly activity. It requires sentences to be composed in advance – there is less scope, or at least more of a cost, to “cut and paste”. It necessitates greater accuracy in spelling – there is no autocorrect. It requires more time – there is no predictive text. And it requires more dexterity and variety of movement. All this promotes reflection, on both what has been written and what comes next – and those few seconds, or even nano-seconds, can make all the difference.
Let us not forget, moreover, that the written word is an art form in its own right. Beyond calligraphy, which is specifically designed to be art, the form of the written word is unique to the writer at that time and place. Historically, we look at handwritten letters, speeches or documents and are enthralled by the thought processes revealed via the editing process, the sense of stress or reflection hinted at in how the words are written, the stylistic changes over time as writers mature and age, all of which hold clues to the writer’s character.
For those of us in higher education, however, handwriting as an act and as an art should not just be a topic to be studied. It should be celebrated – and required for our students. The time and effort required to produce good handwritten material will improve their clarity of thought and expression.
There is, of course, a danger that the gains in perspicacity will be offset by declines in legibility. As many of us have experienced, students are often not well practised at writing by hand. When they are required to do so in exams, they have problems spelling, struggle to construct arguments, and often suffer physical cramps, resulting in semi-legible work that makes assessment more difficult and tiring for staff.
But this is our challenge to overcome – particularly if our concerns about the use of AI to cheat leads us to introduce more technology-free, in-person assessments, as well as full exams. We should be instilling in our students the value of handwriting, the purpose of requiring it to be used and the benefits it brings to them. And we should be actively teaching them how to produce handwritten work. We may even have to go so far as to introduce writing classes as the schools and further education colleges that prepare our students move increasingly to the use of laptops and tablet devices.
This is not a Luddite call to go back to the days of quills, slate or chalk. I embrace new technology, typing, predictive text, emojis and even ChatGPT to communicate something very simply and quickly. But for the scholarly process, saving a few seconds is much less important than thinking deeply.
I would urge readers to try writing their next paper or report by hand. Take time over it. Appreciate the physical process. Reflect on how it enhances your creativity and helps you produce better work – perhaps even more enjoyably. And then use this experience to advocate the value of handwriting to your students – and think about how you can better support them in their approach to creative writing as it applies to their studies, in everything from mathematics to philosophy.
And since you ask, yes, I did handwrite this piece first. And, yes, doing so – with a lot of crossings-out, insertions and arrows moving sections around – is slower than just thumping a brain dump into a keyboard and taking it from there. But if my argument has made you think then I don’t consider that effort wasted.
is deputy pro vice-chancellor and professor of public health economics at the University of Exeter.
