The ‘write’ way to learn and remember

8 July 2024

My dear reader, I know this blog isn’t the place for me to process my trauma, but I have a big ol’ sob story to tell you before I launch into the subject matter for this post:

I was the only girl in the remedial handwriting class in primary school (that’s elementary school, for my North American readers). I still vividly recall the utter mortification of being exiled to the bad handwriting table with half a dozen of the grottiest boys in the class, to grind away at incrementally improving my illegible cursive script, while all my female friends could simultaneously gossip and churn out page after page of effortlessly beautiful handwriting. Even after months in the purgatory of remedial writing class, my handwriting still resembled the meanderings of a drunken ant who had stumbled into an inkwell. To this day, my husband teases me that I should have become a doctor, because my handwriting is bad enough to pass as one.

The problem for me was that my brain spun out thoughts way faster than my chubby little fingers could turn them into written words – at least, words that could be read by anyone without an advanced degree in cryptography. When my mother taught me how to touch-type at around the age of 15, I was ecstatic: Finally, I could turn in an essay or assignment, and not get it back peppered with red pen marks from frustrated teachers who couldn’t decipher half the words I had written. (Yes, I went to school in the 1970s and 80s, when teachers marked your work with a red pen because they were more concerned about whether you could spell, add up and organise your thoughts coherently, than how badly you would be traumatised if your mistakes were corrected. Those were the days.)

My mother even had a typewriter with a lovely script typeface, so that I could produce the simulacrum of beautiful handwriting while hammering away at breakneck speed. (I’m pretty sure it was this snazzy Olympia number, which you can pick up on eBay for a paltry US$350.)

As the computer revolution rapidly transformed both educational and work settings, I – like almost everybody else I know – found myself writing by hand less and less often, and relying more and more on typing, swiping, and jabbing at digital boxes with my thumbs.

There’s no denying that crafting an essay, mass-producing business letters and dashing off a quick message to a friend are all more efficiently done using keyboards and screens, than pen and paper. But what are we missing when we type or text, rather than transforming our thoughts into letters and words by hand? According to a growing body of research, there are profound cognitive and educational impacts of this switch in the way we produce written language. Abandoning handwriting may be rendering us less capable of learning, remembering and deeply processing the information we’re learning.

Writing by hand helps children learn to spell and read

My children attended a Montessori preschool in which handwriting was taught through a graded series of activities, based on Maria Montessori’s contention that the skills of writing and reading should be taught side by side, because they are mutually reinforcing.*

In the 1980s, a series of studies was conducted, led by Charles Hulme, on the role that the motoric element of handwriting – that is, the intense brain activity required to achieve the fine motor coordination involved in grasping a pencil or pen and controlling its movements in order to produce letters – played in children’s ability to learn to read and spell. These experiments led Hulme et al to conclude, in the typically understated manner of researchers, that indeed,

“It is, perhaps, not unreasonable to speculate that the motor activity involved in learning to write may be beneficial to the development of basic reading skills.”

Some experimental studies of multi-sensory teaching: the effects of manual tracing on children’s paired-associate learning

Drawing on Hulme’s work, in a 1990 study, researchers explored different permutations of the Simultaneous Oral Spelling method, “in which children learn to spell a word by pronouncing a word written and spoken for them, pronouncing the name of each letter while writing the word, and then repeating the whole word again”. Children achieved higher accuracy on spelling tests when they hand-wrote the words they were learning, than when they typed them on a computer or arranged letter tiles to form them.

The researchers concluded that

“Regarding the importance of writing movements and manual tracing, the wisdom of such master teachers as Montessori (1915) and Fernald (1943) seems to have been confirmed.”

Early Spelling Acquisition: Writing Beats the Computer

Likewise, adults learned previously-unknown characters (modified from the Bengali and Gujarati alphabets) more effectively, and were less prone to confusing them with their mirror images – like ‘b’ and ‘d’ or ‘p’ and ‘q’ in English – when they learned the characters by hand-writing them vs typing them on a keyboard.

A 2009 study found that young adults had better recall and more accurate recognition of a list of words that they had handwritten, rather than typed. The authors of this study expressed concern that

“After millennia of the time consuming process of hand writing, our ability to generate text quickly now appears to be at the risk of learning what we have written down.”

Comparing Memory for Handwriting versus Typing

There are, of course, both superficial and deep aspects of learning. The superficial aspects of learning relate to memorising basic facts, such as the date on which the incident occurred that supposedly caused World War I to break out, and the persons involved in that incident. The deep aspects concern the conceptual relationships between those facts, such as what really caused World War I (hint: watch James Corbett’s superb documentary The WWI Conspiracy).

The concern that we might be sacrificing deep understanding for sheer volume of text output was, unfortunately, confirmed by a 2014 study which found that students who took lecture notes by typing on a laptop performed just as well on factual-recall questions as students who hand-wrote their notes, but significantly worse on conceptual-application questions.

Interestingly, “participants who took longhand notes wrote significantly fewer words… than those who typed”, and their notes had much less verbatim overlap with the lecture. That is, they summarised the lecture content in their own words, which requires much deeper cognitive processing than merely transcribing that content. And the less verbatim overlap with the lecture content, the better students performed on the factual-recall and conceptual-application questions.

OK, so there’s clear experimental evidence that writing by hand improves letter recognition, reading ability, memory and conceptual understanding of educational content, compared to typing. But what causes these differences in learning outcomes?

Writing by hand activates the brain more than typing, especially in regions associated with memory and learning

Using high-density electroencephalograms to measure brain activity in young adults and 12-year-old children, researchers found significantly higher brain activity when participants were either writing by hand or drawing using a digital pen on a touchscreen, than when they were typewriting on a keyboard.

Participants donned nets studded with 256 evenly distributed sensors that measured the electrical activity throughout their brains as they were shown a series of words, and then performed each of three tasks: writing the words in cursive by hand, typewriting the words, or drawing pictures that represented the words. Neuronal activity in regions of the brain that are known to be important for memory and for encoding new information was markedly higher in young adults when hand-writing or drawing, compared to when typewriting. The same activation patterns were seen in 12 year olds, but to a lesser extent.

But isn’t writing by hand just too slow and laborious for the modern world? Not necessarily!

Writing by hand is faster than using devices for some tasks, and leads to better memory recall

Japanese researchers assigned university students and recent graduates to read fictional dialogues in which characters discussed their future plans, mentioning the dates and times of both personal and academic appointments (such as class times and assignment due dates) for the next two months. Participants were asked to extract and record the appointments, in one of three ways:

1. Using a paper personal organiser notebook, pre-printed with monthly calendars, and a four-colour pen;
2. Using a calendar app on a digital tablet, and a stylus;
3. Using a calendar app on a smartphone, and either flick input with the finger(s) or a virtual keyboard.

Participants were assigned to the three conditions such that each group was well-matched for age, sex and short-term memory ability. To factor out the confounding effect of preference for, and familiarity with, either digital or analogue methods, participants who regularly used digital tablets for scheduling were assigned to the Tablet group, and those who reported the greatest use of smartphones were assigned to either the Tablet or Phone group.

The researchers were interested in three main questions:

1. How long did participants take to complete each method of recording the appointments; and
2. How well did participants recall the information they had recorded using each method; and
3. What was happening in participants’ brains as they attempted to recall the information in order to answer both simple and complex questions?

The answer to the first question may be surprising to those of us who abandoned our paper diaries on the promise that high-tech scheduling solutions were so much more efficient. Filling in the paper datebook took participants an average of 11 minutes, while participants assigned to using the tablet and smartphone took 14 minutes and 16 minutes respectively. The effect of familiarity with using devices for schedule management was assessed by assigning some participants who usually used a paper diary, to use either the tablet or smartphone for the recording task. This group was labelled the Device group in the scatter plot below, and as you can see, this group took about as long to perform the task as participants who habitually used devices for scheduling tasks and appointments (N.B. each dot on the scatter plot represents the time taken by an individual participant to complete the task):

Information recall was tested using a multiple choice format in which four possible answers were offered for each of 16 questions. Five of these were simple questions, such as what date a particular assignment was due; and the remaining nine were complex questions, such as converting the date of an appointment to the day of the week on which it fell, and recalling the relationship between multiple appointments (e.g. in which order they occurred). Participants performed the memory retrieval task whilst inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures blood flow in specific regions of the brain. Increased blood flow is an indicator of increased neuronal activity in that area.

There was no difference in overall recall accuracy between the three groups, but those who had been assigned to hand-write the appointments in a datebook did better on the simple recall tasks:

Ok, so it takes less time to record appointments in a datebook than on your fancy-schmancy device, and you can remember those appointments more easily when you write them down on paper than when you use a stylus on a tablet, or tap boxes on a screen. The researchers interpreted these findings as suggesting “that the cognitive processes for the Note group were actually deeper and more solid”.

But stuff got really interesting when the researchers compared the brain activity of participants in each group during the memory retrieval task. The fMRI scans showed that participants who hand-wrote the appointments in a datebook had more activity than either the tablet or smartphone groups, in brain regions and networks associated with language and imaginary visualisation, and in the hippocampus – a brain structure that is known to be important for memory and navigation. These findings indicate that the pen-on-datebook participants were searching their memory-banks for specific words, and picturing in their mind’s eye where they had written these words on the pages of the datebook.

Although participants assigned to the tablet had used a stylus, simulating the handwriting element of the task, their fMRI scans indicated that they were less able to visualise the appointments on the screen than those who wrote on paper. The researchers attributed this to the uniformity of screens, which provide no visual ‘hooks’ on which the brain can ‘hang’ memories for easier retrieval:

“The significant superiority in both accuracy and activations for the Note group suggested that the use of a paper notebook promoted the acquisition of rich encoding information and/or spatial information of real papers and that this information could be utilized as effective retrieval clues, leading to higher activations in these specific regions.”

Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval

And they express serious concerns about the profound effect that switching from analogue to digital teaching tools could have on our ability to learn, recall what we’ve learned, and work with that information in complex ways:

“Our present experiments demonstrated that brain activations related to memory, visual imagery, and language during the retrieval of specific information, as well as the deeper encoding of that information, were stronger in participants using a paper notebook than in those using electronic devices. Our results suggest that the use of a paper notebook affects these higher-order brain functions, and this could have important implications for education, particularly in terms of the pros and cons of e-learning. The expanded use of mobile devices or computers could undercut the use of traditional textbooks and paper notebooks, which may in fact provide richer information from the perspective of memory encoding.”

Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval

What should we do with this information?

By this point, you may be wondering if we’re all doomed to become complete cabbage-brains because most of us – including our children – no longer write by hand on a regular basis. Of course not. There are many advantages to typing using keyboards instead of hand-writing; I shudder to think how I would have written this article if not for the wonders of word processing technology that allows me to quickly throw down my thoughts on the screen, and then easily edit them into something approximating a sensible format.

But for those of us who are struggling to remember names and phone numbers, or learn a new language, or sort through competing priorities in order to make a decision, or even to process traumatic events, there’s a lot to be said for resurrecting the dying art of handwriting. Heck, maybe I could process my childhood trauma about that remedial writing class by… writing about it. I’ll get back to you on that one.

Certainly, if you have preschool or school-aged children, you should be encouraging them to write by hand as often as possible. Have them write shopping lists, birthday cards, reports on their outings and holiday trips, summaries of television programs and movies they’ve seen and (hopefully) books they’ve read – anything at all that will help them practise the vital skill of turning facts, ideas and thoughts into written words.

Encourage your older students to write lecture notes by hand instead of on a laptop, and ask them to reflect on whether they gain a better, deeper understanding of what they were supposed to have learned, using this method.

Both children and adults also benefit from drawing – and using a digital pen on a touchscreen still activates the regions of the brain associated with learning and memory, so you don’t have to be a total luddite.

I often set writing tasks for my clients, in which I ask them to write letters to their past or future selves, or to write questions about major life decisions with their dominant hand, and then answer those questions with their non-dominant hand. You’d be amazed at what comes up!

I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. Are you a regular hand-writer? Do you still have a paper diary, birthday book or address book? Do you use hand-writing to help you learn and remember new things? Or are you a proud digital tech user who hasn’t picked up a pen in years? Can your kids write by hand or are they only capable of swiping and poking at screens – and have you noticed any connection between this and their reading and/or mathematical ability?

Are you confused by the scientific claims and counter-claims that you encounter through popular and social media? Would you like to learn how to read scientific research, assess its biases, and understand how it fits within the body of scientific literature? My EmpowerEd membership program is custom-made for you. Activate your free 1-month trial today!

* Although my son had already learned to read by the time he started preschool, at age three, because his code-cracking brain had managed to figure out the relationship between the mysterious markings in the books I read to him daily, and the associated sounds. The first inkling I had that he could read, was when he announced, at around 2-and-a-half, “Lop power poles not trees.” Utterly bemused by his utterance, I looked around and realised that he was reading a sign attached to the fence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he can also decipher my handwriting.