Handwriting ability and brain development

‘ust the other day, a casual conversation I had with a CEO of aresearch institution revealed something startling.

- BY SUSIRITH MENDIS ([e-mail])

One of the recent intern recruits to the institution had been asked to take notes at a meeting so that he could later write a short report on it —a basic learning experience for the guy who was an undergraduate. After the meeting, when the CEO asked him for his notes, he replied that he “wrote” them on his smart phone. It was found that he hadn't done even that to any acceptable degree. The CEO went on to tell me that many of the new Gen-Z generation does not “write”. They just punch keys on their ‘smart phones’ instead!

Adding to this concern was a recent short article that appeared in The Island newspaper titled “How to teach kids to write by hand, and why it still makes sense to do so”. The article quotes a German Emeritus Professor Friedrich Schonweiss who says that even in this technological age, children need to learn to write with pen and paper.

Having been a medical teacher for nearly 45 years and seeing long-term deteriorating trends in handwriting skills (indecipherable answer scripts), I could understand what might be happening. Two things must have played a role in this outcome. (i) attention is no longer paid by teachers during ‘early childhood learning’ about handwriting ability — i.e., forming letters of the alphabet; (ii) even preschoolers now have smartphones and use their hands mostly for scrolling and tapping keys. I remember during our ‘ancient’ days when much of our first year in school was spent on perfecting our script on Sinhala and English ‘copybooks’ where we were trained how to perfectly write every letter in the alphabet, guided by lines in red and blue. Writing by hand with pencil/pen and paper then, was the only option.

How does not writing by hand affect brain development?