My Handwriting Is Dead and I Don't Even Care

The last thing I wrote out in handwriting for another human was I don’t know. I’ve filled out some forms pretty recently, yes, and it took a lot of effort and, on some occasions, multiple tries to produce something legible, even just an address and social security number. The last real thing, with sentences and paragraphs and thoughts, was probably the GRE circa 2003. It’s 2012 now and what we have currently for writing skills is below.

That’s the casual, without-much-effort version. It can clean up some with intense care, which is a very awkward feeling. It makes me feel like something is wrong with my hand, like a nerve connecting my brain to it has been severed and I’m having to instruct each muscle through seperate, individual wires, like one of those dangly puppets. The result of that is a bit of a parody of my old handwriting style, from when I had handwriting ability: exaggerated stalks with the bottom, bulbous parts of letters (the hump of a lowercase “h” for example) being contorted little knots far out of proportion.

Today is the anniversary of the pencil and that’s why I’m writing this, but I think about my handwriting a lot because it feels like a disability I’ve aquired, no matter that I rarely ever need it. These days you can sign forms on a computer more often than not. I write a lot of shorthand, however, and that doesn’t help. This usually occurs when I’m reviewing a concert, which I used to do a lot — scribbling coded messages to myself on a small pad in the dark of a room packed past the fire code. I consider this is a skill gained actually, shorthand. And it happened naturally the more and more I jotted to myself in these dark rooms: I trained myself to decode my own scribbles, quite accidentally.

Writing cursive actually helps in keeping some sense of form. It doesn’t seem like a whole lot of my peers remember cursive well, but the way it forces letters to be strung together forces some level of coherency. Too bad cursive is basically just another secret code, or quickly becoming so. There’s a million essays about The Death of Handwriting out there on the internet — targetwise, it’s low-hanging fruit for techno alarmists because a great many of us experience it to some degree. But there’s some actual science out there too, including a fairly recent (2011) paper/study by Sandra Sülzenbrück et al in the Journal of Motor Behavior called “The Death of Handwriting: Secondary Effects of Frequent Computer Use on Basic Motor Skills.”

The results aren’t exactly mind-blowing. “Individuals who primarily used keyboards and computers to produce written texts exhibited slower performance in a task measuring the precision of continuous arm–hand movements than people who regularly practiced the skill of handwriting,” Sülzenbrück et al writes. It gets worse: “More importantly, the results presented here imply that the use of computers not only affects the specific skill of handwriting, but also similarly affects fine motor skills and thus more general features of the human behavioral repertoire.”

Oh, and even worse actually:

Our finding supports the claim that the frequent use of modern technologies, and especially of cognitive tools such as computers, electronic organizers, or in-vehicle navigation systems, may lead to fundamental changes in basic psychomotor and cognitive skills. These changes are likely due to a reduced expertise and training of specific skills, resulting from tasks being taken over by cognitive tools. This lack of practice not only selectively impairs the specific untrained skill, but can also affect a broader range of human skills.

Really, this is frustratingly obvious. If you don’t practice a thing, you get worse at the thing. Moreover, cognitive activities/skills don’t occur in isolation: as I’m getting worse at handwriting, I’m getting worse at, well, thinking. (Though, this is presumably balanced in some way by my new “tapping” skills.) It’s also important to note that the difference found in the study held only for right-handers and the difference was around 30-percent. (Also the sample size here was fairly small with 20 total participants.)

Now is the part where I ask So what? The tools have changed. It’s not the first time people have adapted to new tools. We have handed off some part of the symbol creation process to a machine, which makes perfectly uniform symbols for us. Ultimately I’m less concered about the motor skills ability and its disappearance than the loss of the ability to reveal things via the symbol creation process, the other meanings that came across in handwriting. This is the part that you can presumably find in all those essays on the internet crafted by fingers on keyboards, but actual communication has been lost to keyboards too — how a word can look “stern” from one hand and soft and lovey from another.

I guess I’m not too freaked out about this, nor am I eager to mourn the pencil on its birthday. I can’t even fathom how much better I write and how much more I’m able to communicate now that I don’t have to worry about crafting symbols with my hands, which I was never very good at anyhow. I do this faster and I can self-edit in the same stream of thought that creates new words. I wonder how many more better thoughts just passed me as I was scrawling out the first ones that came to mind back in the ol’ handwriting days. (Disclaimer: In addition to writing about science and technology, I spend a very large amount of time playing violin and, recently, bouldering so I like to think my general motor skills are are coming out about even.)

And I’m pretty sure that, when the apocalypse comes, I’ll be able to pick up handwriting again. Just as long as I have a junked keyboard around to use as a template.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.