With the development of technology, "paperless" seems to be the new trend. Instead of writing by hand, people began to use computers to type in order to produce text quickly. Some people said word processing made producing and editing text much easier. Will handwriting be completely replaced by typing?
A 2017 study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that regions of the brain associated with learning were more active when subjects completed a task by hand instead of on a keyboard. Not only that, but the study's authors also found that writing by hand could promote "deep encoding or processing" in a way that typing does not.
In fact, there have been many such studies to arrive at that conclusion. One notable example from 2014 compared students who took notes by hand with those who took notes on laptops. They found that the students using laptops tended to write down what the professor said word for word, while those who took notes by hand were more likely to listen to what was being said, analyzing it for important content and "processing information and reframing it in their own words." When asked conceptual questions about the lecture, students who had taken notes by hand were better able to answer than those who had typed their notes.
Daniel Oppenheimer, one of the study's co-authors, told Medium's Elemental that in order to analyze the lecture, people had to contemplate the material and actually understand the arguments. This helped them learn the material better. The most annoying thing about writing by hand is also what makes it so effective for learning.
Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington, says, "When we write a letter of the alphabet, the process of production involves pathways in the brain that go near or through parts that manage emotion." Pressing a key doesn't stimulate those pathways the same way. She says, "It's possible that there's not the same connection to the emotional part of the brain when people type, as opposed to writing in longhand." "In the same vein, writing in longhand also allows people to really figure out what they mean to say," Oppenheimer says, "which may help self-expression."
Our keyboards are great for a lot of things. But sometimes, there's no replacing the feeling of spreading out a clean sheet of paper, uncapping a beloved pen, and letting the ink flow.
