The lost art of handwriting

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0:42Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over$1 ,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save. A handwritten note is super important. and yet I feel like that's something being lost. It's useless. Cursive is outdated. My wife, not so much in agreement on that.

1:28I take a lot of pride in my handwriting, actually. I joke that I was a calligrapher in a past life.

1:42Jonquilyn Hill:My parents started dating back in the 80s, and for a while, they were long distance. This was way before the smartphone, so they sent each other a ton of mail. They wrote letters back and forth, and my dad would make my mom mixtapes to send her. I love it because it's a peek into my parents' lives before me. I can feel the paper. I can see my mom's beautiful penmanship. But it also makes me realize we really don't physically write all that much anymore. But some of you are trying to bring it back. Handwriting is a big part of my life. I've been bullet journaling since eighth grade, and now I just graduated college.

2:24I love writing my notes. I keep a shopping list that my partner likes to make fun of and consistently tries to make digital.

2:33Jonquilyn Hill:My husband loves to joke that I write enough letters to keep the post office in business. I'm John Glenn Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, the handwritten word. how our relationship with writing has changed, and how that's changed us. First up, learning how to write. I called up Sean Datchik. I'm a professor of special education at the University of Iowa. I'm also a former K-12 teacher, administrator, and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. Okay, Sean, it may be a surprise to no one, but it has been a while since I was in elementary school, and things have changed a lot since then.

3:17Jonquilyn Hill:When do students start to learn handwriting in schools and how is it being taught now? The vast majority of states, approximately 48, have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten and extends a little bit past the first grade. Now, importantly, the standards only focus on print handwriting, so text that's unconnected. There's a huge range of time spent on handwriting, but on average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms. 10 minutes does not seem like a lot of time.

3:59Jonquilyn Hill:Looking back, it felt like so much more. When did handwriting become less of a priority? Yeah, so changes really started to happen around 2010. And that was when the passage of the national academic standards that's typically called the Common Core academic standards were adopted across the United States. It is one of the most confusing, controversial issues in the entire nation. It's percolating at the grassroots level, making its way onto the national stage. It's the Common Core. The Common Core raises the bar for students' performance. We have to challenge our students in ways that have them interact more actively in learning.

4:40And in those standards, there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and to start to adopt keyboarding or typing. So the standards explicitly talk about that students should make this transition to keyboarding right after the first and second grade.

4:58Jonquilyn Hill:Wow, that's so early. Right, yeah. And then in those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding, and it completely dropped out cursive handwriting. Wow, you know, okay, I think of my own education, it was print, cursive, and then eventually you get to your Mavis Beacon typing lessons. Welcome to typing class. I'm your teacher, Mavis Beacon. Click the computer in the center of your screen to start your lesson. And I remember being so excited for third grade in particular because where I went to school, that was when they started teaching cursive. And it was like, oh, my gosh, cursive. But is it just not being taught at all anymore in K-12 schools?

5:43So over the past several years, there's been a swing back towards cursive. So the latest count is approximately 26 states across the United States have passed some sort of legislation reinserting cursive into their statewide curriculum. Florida students will soon be learning cursive again. Learning cursive handwriting will now be mandatory in California schools. Pennsylvania students haven't been required to learn cursive since around 2010. But today the writing is on the wall and it is the law. So there is some compelling evidence that handwriting, whether it's print or cursive, is closely related to reading development.

6:22So following the COVID-19 pandemic, across the nation, we saw dips in reading scores. So there is some thought by educational stakeholders and legislatures that perhaps if we focus in on handwriting, or in this case cursive, maybe that will improve student reading scores. And I also hear consistently from parents, guardians, teachers, they're very interested in minimizing screen time. And then there's also, there's a camp of people out there who may have a strong patriotic inclination, and they say that, well, the Declaration of Independence is written in cursive, so we should teach kids cursive because it looks so different than print, so that way they can study the founding documents.

7:07Jonquilyn Hill:You've worked in education for a very long time, and I'm curious what you make of the changing trends in handwriting. Is pen and paper actually better compared to screens? That's a complicated question. But for younger kids who are learning how to read, there does seem to be some benefit on specifically using pencil and paper.

7:34There is such a close connection between reading and writing. When students learn how to handwrite, they are basically committing to memory not only the shape of what a letter looks like, but also its name. So let's say you're teaching a student, this is a letter M. And then they learn and commit to memory, oh, these are the different strokes or loops of M. And that also makes the mmm sound. So they're committing that to memory. And so that allows them to draw on that for when they're reading. Now, for older high school students, there also seems to be some logic in how distracting screens can be.

8:10So, I mean, I've taught high school before. I also currently teach undergraduate students. And there's a lot of different things that pop up on screens, whether it's online shopping or checking messages or checking emails, that can definitely distract from learning important content. Now, let me kind of flip over the other side. Screens are definitely here to stay. And I think pencils and paper are also here to stay. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. That also adds in a whole other layer of complexity to this. Yeah. So for instructors and parents and guardians, perhaps the better question to ask is not so much which is better, but it's how much time do my kids need with each one of these ways to communicate, whether it's with a paper and pencil or whether it's with a with a computer or tablet or smartphone.

9:07own.

9:10Jonquilyn Hill:You know, we talked a little bit about this evolution of technology. You have pen and paper, you have computers, you have smartphones. Now we have AI. Is AI another reason to keep handwriting alive? You know, unfortunately, I think so. So computer based writing and with the rise of artificial intelligence, I think it brings up difficult to determine questions on authorship. I definitely see kind of a shift back almost to the blue books. After being a fixture on campuses for generations, the blue book is making a comeback to combat cheating in the AI era. Get this, they're making students pull out their pens and pencils once again and just write on paper by hand.

9:53I know that the Iowa bookstore here has started stocking blue books on their shelves for the first time since I've been here. I've been here over a decade. So it is surprising.

10:03Jonquilyn Hill:What do you think students lose if they stop writing by hand regularly? I do think that one of the strongest reasons that I can think of to engage in handwriting is actually probably what we consider a moral reason or lesson, is that handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us. And I think that's one of the reasons why a handwritten note resonates so emotionally with us as humans. You know, so like, for instance, when my mom had her recent birthday, I sent her a handwritten card on Mother's Day. My sons and I wrote little notes, and my four-year-old drew a picture for my wife. And then I've been by mid-40s, so probably one of the rites of passage and being kind of a middle-aged person now is we were, My wife and I went through the process of getting a living will put together.

10:57Jonquilyn Hill:Oh, yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Gotta have all your ducks in a row. And then last night I was making handwritten notes on the living will because I knew that was something that I really needed to think through carefully and deliberately. And at least for me and what we kind of see with even lots of college-age students is that when you engage in writing with a pen or pencil, you tend to synthesize or think more deeply about that information than when you're just typing.

11:34Jonquilyn Hill:So we take in information better when we write it down. What else does writing do for us? That's next.

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14:23Jonquilyn Hill:I'm J.Q. Back with more Explain It To Me. Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she researches technology and human behavior. And one human behavior that she loves to dig into is writing. One of those things that I think we all take for granted, that's a skill we all have. And I had young children at the time and noticed that they weren't being taught handwriting in school the way I was. So I thought, well, am I an old timer who's just sort of hearkening back nostalgically to the good old days? Or is there something useful in handwriting? One of the most surprising things I discovered is that learning to write by hand, whether that's printing block letters or later cursive handwriting, doesn't just teach you how to put words on paper.

15:08It implicates all kinds of things about short-term and long-term memory. It affects our ability to analyze text. If you haven't learned how to write well by hand, you approach words differently. You understand and remember them differently. So there's all kinds of broader implications for how we remember the things we read that are based in some of that embodied cognition. So that was really fascinating to me. The other thing I found is that it just makes us slow down. If you're thinking and writing, your body doesn't allow you to write as quickly as you can type on a keyboard. So that also changes the process of how we put words to paper.

15:43Jonquilyn Hill:I will say we heard from a lot of listeners on this topic, and we heard from a lot of listeners who still prefer to write things out. I do. You typically write a card, a letter, a few postcards. I write those at least two or three times a week. My friends and I, after we graduated from college, got into the habit of mailing each other monthly letters. My wife likes love letters, and so I write her one once a week. But it is true. Typing is faster and more convenient. Why is slowing down a good thing? Why do we need to slow down? Well, I think we all sort of complain sometimes about how the world seems to just be speeding up year after year.

16:27And our technologies encourage that sense of, with infinite scroll and all the things that we can do with them, to make time not be located in place and not be slower. But what it robs us of is downtime, time where we can daydream, let our minds wander. And sitting and thinking and writing your thoughts forces you to really shape those thoughts in a way that you do differently on the screen. It's actually a necessary and healthy practice in daily life that more and more of us should try to integrate into our lives.

16:58Jonquilyn Hill:In some states, teaching cursive is now being required in public schools again. And there's been a boom in the notebook and pen market. Several years ago, I discovered fountain pens and fountain pen ink. And it's just a beautiful, tactile, visual experience. I love pens. I love stationery. I get compliments on my handwriting all the time. I have found truly nothing is better than pen to paper. We're also seeing a resurgence of physical media coming from younger generations like Gen Z, you know, vinyl, cassettes, CDs. Are people just being sentimental about some of this archaic technology or is there something real here?

17:40I think the first instinct we all have is to say, oh, nostalgia trip. Isn't that cute? It's just a small group of people who, you know, the guy who always wants to only listen to things on vinyl. But I think this is somewhat different.

17:55I think the search for this, particularly among younger generations, speaks to a desire for tangible things, things they can hold in their hand. Because if you think about their memories, for example, most of them are in a digital cloud. Those might disappear. They're not organized in the way that we used to organize our old-fashioned memories of whether they put in a scrapbook or a photo album, something you could pick up and touch. So I think that it speaks to a deeper impulse for those tangible objects. I think it's also a desire to reintroduce into their lives something that technology took away.

18:28And that's some friction because in some sense, technology has made certain things so easy that we miss that pushback, that response we get from the world when we rub up against something the wrong way and have to figure it out ourselves. So I see it all as a pretty hopeful expression of not wanting to totally de-skill ourselves as human beings. And we need friction to learn. We need frustration to understand our own approach to things. And in some small way, handwriting reintroduces that for some people. And I think that's all for the good.

19:03Jonquilyn Hill:Is our handwriting socialized? I don't know. I remember my parents being like, you need to write neater. We're practicing, making me write sentences, saying like, you need to have neat handwriting. But is it just something sort of like, sorry, that's the way I write? So it's interesting. I think when we're all younger, we're sort of, it feels very conformist and oppressive to be told everyone's letters should look the same. But that is actually the building block for later being able to be expressive with your writing. Just like anyone who's an accomplished painter will tell you, they have to first learn to do the basic forms and the shadowing.

19:37So we should think about that with our handwriting, and it's why we should practice. And I think it's great that many schools are bringing back teaching handwriting. but I think it is your parents were exactly right because they understood that your handwriting is a reflection of who you are in the world and you'll be judged by it and so that's one of the things where a lot of kids these days when they the most interesting anecdote I have come across in my research were bakeries like at supermarkets having problems hiring people to be bakers because none of the people they hired knew how to write a happy birthday message in cursive to make it look nice on a cake wow so they had to teach them cursive so they could decorate the cake so So, yeah, it's great.

20:15I think we need the basics, though, in order to then later have a more expressive form of handwriting. Change is normal.

20:22Jonquilyn Hill:Socrates said writing things down would make people lazy and make us stop relying on our memories. People thought the Sony Walkman was going to make us antisocial and isolated. Do we romanticize the past? Do we need to accept that people have moved on? Or, yeah, I wonder how you think balancing that, like moving forward with the times, but also kind of cherishing these old ways. This is the great question. And it's each age has to ask it again for itself. So I think, look, I don't want to go back to you can you can pry my washing machine out of my cold, dead hands like that thing's not technology is here to stay.

21:03And I, you know, look, I use digital streaming music. I use our computers every day for work. I wouldn't want to go back. But I think the challenge now is that we have to actively carve out those analog moments. We have to make the effort and we have to relearn lessons about what we should value in daily life. So I think we should value more face-to-face interaction, more civility in public life, like acknowledging the stranger when they walk into the elevator. And these seem like small niceties, but they really matter in terms of our day-to-day lives and the ability to be civil to each other.

21:36So we have to choose it now. It is an option never to do it that way. And that is brand new. So in some ways, I think we do adapt and we have adapted, but we can overcorrect towards technology and start to become a little too machine-like in our own way of behaving and thinking. And I think sometimes we need to step back and say, what are the human things that we've lost in doing that?