Handwriting is dead

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This text is part of: "Problem of Schooling" by Piotr Wozniak (2017-2024)

Handwriting in decline

Handwriting is one of the best illustrations of how the school system preserves the past instead of forging the future. In 2021, the usefulness of handwriting in many professions dropped to an all time low. In industrialized countries, adults make only 10% notes by hand. Children limit that to 5% (except when they are forced to write by hand at school).

Very few people need to write by hand fast, or beautifully, or a lot. In digital age, handwritten notes make sense only at times when digital devices are unavailable or powered off. This is increasingly rare. At a pinch, we can still rely on human memory.

When Bill Gates spoke to Larry King to welcome the new millennium, I hung to all his words. He was a technology visionary from who I could always learn a lot. However, he failed to predict the role of handwriting in the future. He promised that Microsoft was just 3 years away from solid handwriting recognition. At SuperMemo World we were also convinced that speech recognition and handwriting recognition are a must. We invested in pioneering proprietary technologies from Ukraine and worked hard on the implementation. However, those tools never found place in SuperMemo for Windows and were of limited use in other applications of SuperMemo.

Handwriting at school

In 2021, the main application of handwriting is to train millions of children in an art that is dying. This undermines prospect for turning penmanship into true art. This ruins the art we might admire. Most of children learn to write by hand only to lose their skills gradually later in life.

School has a knack at perpetuating the past and generate demand for their own services

The immortal defense of handwriting comes from people who insist that penmanship is good for the brain. It is true. So is unicycle riding and using the touchpad in computer games. All healthy human activities have some good influence on the brain, and it is up to humans to choose what to engage in. Forcing kids to learn handwriting is equally smart as forcing a middle-aged woman to learn how to skate.

Loss of my own handwriting

My handwriting is horrible. If I slow down, I can still write a reasonably nice postcard to a granny who never learned to use digital devices. Over 40 years, I transitioned from a prolific hand-writer to a near-illiterate. My story is described in an anecdote insert below:

Personal anecdote. Why use anecdotes?
My own writing skills are horrible when compared to teenagers even though no kid could compete with me with the volume of notes I wrote on paper in the past. Before the era of the Internet, compiling notes from many books into customized texts was of high value, and I was particularly meticulous at that. I wrote lengthy notebooks on biology, biochemistry, and other subjects. I always wanted to move to typewriting, but I could only access a typewriter at mom's work. Moreover, my typing would disrupt work of her co-workers. I started an ambitious project of typing a long book about biology at the age of 15-16. It was a beautiful project, but I only managed to type and illustrate several pages.

Only at Christmas 1983, at the age of 21, I got my own typewriter. I planned to type daily. I wanted to type my daily diary, but it was too cumbersome. The old typewriter produced too many smudges. I had to give up on that idea. I used the typewriter only for most important texts.

I got a better typewriter in 1985 (Erika), and typed my diary for two years (1986 and 1987). In 1987, I had my first PC and started keeping my diary in Edlin (a text editor). However, on Jan 1, 1988, I switched back to paper diary to be able to:

  • add notes during the day (starting up the PC would take too long, and it would not be on for most of the day as it is these days)
  • keep the diary safe from loss or damage (I still did not trust floppy diskettes that were small and expensive (afair, 360KB))
  • possibility of adding my handwritten picture illustrations (I somehow lost that need over years; if I need a picture, rarely, I get it from the net, otherwise I describe things in words)
  • possibility of writing in bed (in those days I used to occasionally spend a few days each year in bed in case of cold or flu)

The switch to handwriting coincided with a switch to Esperanto, which I hoped would be the language that would unite humanity. Years later I regretted all those decision as I needed to rely on a colleague to type all that data into the computer and provide translations from Polish and Esperanto to English (to facilitate search that makes summaries like this one possible).

On Dec 22, 1988, I bought my first printer. It required a train trip to Szczecin which is 200 km away from Poznan. This was a day, I made serious progress into reading Restak's "The Brain". Even a train trip can be useful. With a paper backup from the printer, I started trusting computers well-enough to start my diary on the PC again (Dec 30, 1988). I never looked back. On Aug 1, 1989, I switched back from Esperanto to English. I concluded that I needed every minute of training in the language if I was to ever achieve proficiency.

Until 1993, I stuck with the habit of printing out diaries for safety, but even that seemed superfluous with the arrival of CD-Rs (writeable CDs for backup).

On Aug 22, 2000, I got rid of my printer. I definitely stopped printing my notes out. At last, I was free from paper and from handwriting. The evolution took 32 years, but my tardiness is partly excused by the slow progress of technology. Over the last 21 years, my handwriting gradually degenerated to its current level. I still make some notes on paper when I am away from the devices, but I often fail to be able to read my own notes. If I read them early, I reconstruct the semantics from the readable keywords. After a week, 80-90% of the notes become useless

All kids today are luckier. They do not need to follow my arduous pathway. However, it is even more painful for them, if schools force them to go that ancient path! Hopefully, this will accelerate the demise of the Prussian School Model that preserves the past and slows down progress.

If your kid prefers computers over paper, let him adapt to the world his own way now!

Impact of handwriting on SuperMemo

Inefficiency of handwriting sparked the progress of print. However, it also contributed to the emergence of spaced repetition. The ability to treat texts on paper as blocks had also its contribution to incremental reading.

SuperMemo insert. What is SuperMemo?
There would be no SuperMemo nor incremental reading without my effort to produce written notes. I produced so many that it felt like an awful waste that all that effort was to dissipate over time, and even lose validity as compared with more up-to-date materials. The cost of writing was high enough to make the need to remember so much greater. This is how spaced repetition was born (see: History of spaced repetition).

When learning for my exams in biology and computer science, I used paper notes. I used to run through them crossing out pieces well memorized. This inspired incremental reading some 17 years later (see: Serendipitous impact of mindless cramming).

In my own progress, handwriting was useful in its inefficiency. In the end it died as utterly useless. So should it die in schools with the exception of children who love the art of writing



For more texts on memory, learning, sleep, creativity, and problem solving, see Super Memory Guru