Handwriting is Essential

The brain isn’t wired for reading and writing – it’s wired for vision. The brain’s natural capacity to interpret visual stimuli is how we make sense of the physical world, but this same feature of the brain can be a barrier when we’re learning to read. Letter reversals are often associated with dyslexia, but that’s a misperception. It’s common for all students to reverse letters, and (a little counterintuitively) this difficulty is due to our brains being so good at making sense of what we see.  

The part of the brain that processes letters – called “the visual word form” – is also used for facial recognition and recognizing objects. So before we learn to read, that same part of the brain allows us to interpret what we see in the world. When we observe someone’s face from different angles, the visual word form part of the brain informs us that it’s the same face and it belongs to the same person regardless of whether we’re seeing the left side of the face or the right side. When a chair is turned upside down, this visual processing system tells us that it’s still the same chair.

A very helpful cognitive function. But when we’re learning to read, this impulse in the brain to impose visual order can make it difficult to differentiate between b and d or p and q because the brain sees that they’re the same form just turned at a different angle. The brain must learn to suppress some of its natural wiring in order for us to become fluent readers.

Here’s where handwriting comes in.

The way we train the brain to differentiate between these letters is through repeatedly writing them by hand. When students write the letter b while making the sound /b/, they’re forming a connection between the part of the brain that processes sound and the part of the brain that processes the visual input of the letter. This practice connects those two areas of the brain, which is essential for reading and spelling.

There are a lot of reasons why it’s important for children to learn to write fluently by hand. It creates these connections in the brain, and it also serves the memory. When students take notes by hand, for instance, they’re more likely to remember the content they’re recording. Also, do we want to live in a world where handwritten notes are no longer a thing? I don’t think so.

But we live in a digital age that’s growing more digital by the day: handwriting instruction must be paired with typing instruction.

Typing is Essential Too

I have a hypothesis. There’s ample research showing how important handwriting is for comprehensive literacy development – physically writing the letters that make up the sounds does so much to help students solidify their understanding of how sounds and letters are related – so why wouldn’t that be true for typing?

According to Nessy Learning, “Touch typing [typing without looking at the keyboard] gives a dyslexic child the opportunity to work on sound-letter correspondence. This familiarizes a child with what letters make what sound. Touch typing also eliminates the need for the child to form letters. This means a child can more easily focus on the sounds and the symbols they correlate to.”

I’m not proposing that we replace handwriting instruction with typing instruction. We need both. I’m proposing this as a hypothesis because I can’t cite research (though I presume research is forthcoming), but it seems to me that students will also be building new neural connections by practicing the relationship between sounds and letters on a keyboard.

Whether or not the research ends up supporting my hypothesis, this much is certain: students need to learn to type. They absolutely need to spend time with pencil and paper, but if students don’t know how to type, they’re going to be extremely limited in what they’re able to do digitally. Proficient typing skills are going to be crucial for modern students. It will be more and more common for young people to have an agile command of a phone keyboard. Those nimble thumbs will serve them well as texters, but for school and work they’ll need to get the rest of their fingers involved on a full-sized keyboard.

Handwriting and typing are both necessary. We’d be doing our young people a grave disservice by neglecting one or the other. Using pen and pencil on paper will help students learn to read, and will equip them with an important life skill: writing comfortably and legibly by hand. (Poems, grocery lists, journal entries, love letters… Some things just shouldn’t be typed.) But confidence on the keyboard is vital. Typing instruction – which should include speech-to-text assistive technology – will be crucial to prepare students for life in the screen age.

Here’s an analogy to emphasize the both/and message I’m aiming for here: we must teach young people to be skilled, competent drivers. In most settings, safe operation of a vehicle is an essential skill. But they should also take pleasure in walking, and they ought to know what to do with a bike.

References:

Benefits of touch typing. (2021, October 28). Nessy. https://www.nessy.com/en-us/about-us/blog/benefits-of-learning-to-touch-type