Following The Script

In the week of National Handwriting Day, Linda Dearsley discovers why it’s still worth putting to pen and paper.

- Linda Dearsley

In the spring of 2012, Europe’s oldest book, St Cuthbert’s Gospel - written almost 1,400 years ago - was sold to the British Library for a staggering £9 million. The following year, 100,000 people queued in Durham for a glimpse of the Lindisfarne Gospels – on loan to the city – a beautiful ‘illuminated’ manuscript, dating from the eighth century, the pages richly decorated in radiant colours and embellished with pure gold.

Although we revere these ancient books as works of art, the word manuscript actually means hand written in Latin, and after all these centuries, there’s an unbroken link between those monks of old toiling away in their austere monasteries and today’s most gifted writers. From JK Rowling to Oscar-winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino and composer Howard Shore, many of our finest creative figures still produce the first drafts of their work in longhand.

‘There’s something about writing by hand that seems to stimulate creativity,’ says Angela Webb of the National Handwriting Association. But you don’t need to be a budding author to benefit. Research, says Angela, shows that writing by hand boosts memory, stimulates cognitive development in children and enhances reading. Student essays written by hand also have better sentence structure, and contain more richness in the writing than those produced on a keyboard. And it seems that older people benefit from writing by hand, too. Scientists believe the very act of jotting down a few thoughts in pen or pencil on paper can help keep brains active and improve memory.