Tell me, many of us still write!! I mean write literally - Using a pen and paper? I can
assure you that the number is quite low. Today keyboards and touchpads have
replaced the pens in our fingers. So much so, that our fingers have forgotten
how to grasp these old artifacts of the written expression. Not that it matters
– you say. You could type and store information much better in your gadgets.
But one thing which is truly impacted by this abandonment of literal writing is
the skill of handwriting. It was once a major scoring point for people – not
only to the children going to school but also to adults. It was believed that
it showed aspects of your character and personality. The curve, slant and
stroke of your pen was said to say many things about you as a person. But this
graduation into electronic devices has turned our handwriting into such a mess,
that I doubt anyone can really figure out anything about us through it. Or
maybe it still shows?
I
first noticed this assault on my handwriting during my graduate school examinations.
I have never had a beautiful handwriting, but it was legible and had a style to
it, I liked it as a child. 16 years of schooling with countless notes and tests
had ensured that. But two years into graduate school – by that time technology
had caught up with the middle class in India – I spent all my study and assignment
time on the computer. Come examination time, I realized that my hands just
couldn’t move fast enough. It was as if someone was gripping my hands so tight,
I could not move. After that one-hour examination, I came out with my right
hand fingers almost paralyzed with pain. And just don’t ask me about the
handwriting in that test. It was so terrible and barely legible; no wonder I
received such a low score in it.
I
recently read an article – which is my inspiration for this post. It said that
this assault on the handwriting started much before the advent of digital
devices. It started with the invention of Ball Point pen. You will see how.
The
ball point pen was invented by Hungarian journalist – Laszlo Biro. Frankly he
wasn’t the first to create this pen, there were many others, but their designs
had a major flaw. They leaked ink. You see, the only ink available then – the
one used in fountain pens – was too thin. It was necessary for it to be like
that, so that the ink would flow easily through the nib. But this thin ink was
useless in a ball point pen, because it would leak through the front. There was another type of ink - the ones used in printing press, which would dry sooner than a fountain pen ink, but it was too thick to flow through a ball point. It was
Laszlo Biro and his chemist brother Gyorgy who made crucial changes in the ink
making it much more suitable. Their ink and pen design result in a less leaky ball point
pen with a fast drying ink. Since then it has been an universal success. Its design and ink has been
so developed, that within a few years people could not think about life without
the ball point pen.
The
ball point was immensely successful mainly because it scored over the fountain
pen in many ways. It is less heavy, never resulted in stained shirts and there
was no need to carry ink along with you to school or work. Also the ink would
dry very fast which meant no more smudges in the paper. It was just so easy to
use and carry a ball point pen which had a neat effect on the paper. But the
effect of these ball point pens on the physical experience of writing has
changed forever.
When
I was in school, the first few years I had to write with a pencil. When I did
graduate to pens, the school insisted on use of fountain pens for the initial
years before we were allowed to use the ball point in high school. During my
fountain pen days I was sick of them. They were leaky and spewed ink on my
paper; I just couldn’t wait to move on to the ball point pen. But later on as
an adult, when I actually had the freedom to choose which pen to write with, I
tended to prefer the fountain pen. But it was only after reading this article that
I realized why I liked fountain pens and why schools in those times insisted on
their use.
It
is because fountain pens write smoothly.
You barely have to lift your hand from the paper; words just flow out of
the pen in a smooth line. No wonder cursive writing was a big thing when
fountain pens were the fashion of the day. That’s because there is no other way
to write with a fountain pen. It joins the letters and the words with graceful
lines. But the most important advantage is that very minimum pressure is
required to make an impression on the paper. You just have to touch the nib
slightly on the paper to write; don’t need to press it down like in ball point
pen. All this means much less strain on your hand and a better handwriting. You
should really try this sometime. Go get a fountain pen – try writing with it
for a few days and then do this test. Write one page each with that fountain
pen and a ball point pen; then see which one is easy to write with?
The
ball point pen is also the reason why we have moved away from cursive writing. While
the free flowing movement of the fountain pen encouraged the joint slanted
cursive writing, the ball point discouraged it. Most of us think we moved to
print – the un-joined letters we use today instead of cursive writing – due to
the high volumes and speed of writing required during higher education. But in
her book – ‘Teach yourself better handwriting’, the handwriting expert and type
designer Romary Sasoon says, that separate letters, as in print, is rarely
faster than cursive writing. If that is the case then why would we move to
print from cursive which is not only beautiful to look at but also fast? It is
because of the pens we are using. As the author of the article I read says “fountain
pens want to write. Ball point pens have to be convinced to write, need to be
pushed into the paper to make an impression”. Hence the print (un-joined
letters) form of writing it resulted in.
I
think that is enough said about pens and handwriting. Let me get back to the
point I started this post with. Why does handwriting even matter? There is a
lot of research which has been done in this area, and there is new evidence
which links handwriting with education and thinking. It has been found that
children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by
hand, but they also are better able to generate ideas and retain information.
My memories of school days tell me about the copious notes I used to make in
order to remember facts. It seems, when we write, a unique neural circuit is
automatically activated. The gesture of the written word causes a mental
stimulation in the brain.
A
2012 study led by Karin James in Indiana University supported this view. They
found that when children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased
activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they
read and write. However, the children who typed the letter on a computer, there
was barely any activity in those parts of the brain. It has been found that
when children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more
words more quickly than they did on the keyboard, but expressed more ideas. There
are many studies which agree to this, while there are some which go on to say
that that the difference in mental stimulation between writing and typing is
not that great. Whichever side of argument you may believe, the fact is that
writing by hand would definitely be more beneficial than just typing into the
computer. Thank God, India is not that technologically advanced to put IPads
and computers in our youngest citizens. Students still take notes by hand in
our schools and colleges. It helps them learn better, argue two psychologists,
Pam A Mueller of Princeton and Daniel Oppenheimer of University of California.
They say that writing by hand allows the student to process a lecture’s
contents and re-frame it – a process of reflection and manipulation that can
lead to better understanding of memory encoding.
The
benefits of handwriting extend beyond childhood. Even today, I write the best
when it is using a pen and paper. Every post I have written in this blog has
first been penned down in a much used diary and only then has it been
transferred into electronic medium. That is because the ideas flow better and
faster when I am actually writing. It
provides clarity and structure to my thoughts. Thus saying, I rest my case.
References:
Some
portions of this post are excerpts has been taken from the following articles-
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpoint-pens-object-lesson-history-handwriting/402205/
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?_r=1&referer=
