Christine Rosen

One of those things that I think we all take for granted, that's a skill we all have, and I had young children at the time and

noticed that they weren't being taught handwriting in school the way I was.

So I thought, well, am I an old timer who's just sort of hearkening back nostalgically to the good old days?

Or is there something useful in handwriting?

One of the most surprising things I discovered is that learning to write by hand, whether that's printing block letters or later cursive handwriting, doesn't just teach you how to put words on paper.

It implicates all kinds of things about short-term and long-term memory.

It affects our ability to analyze text.

If you haven't learned how to write well by hand, you approach words differently.

You understand and remember them differently.

So there's all kinds of broader implications for how we remember the things we read.

that are based in some of that embodied cognition.

So that was really fascinating to me.

The other thing I found is that it just makes us slow down.

If you're thinking and writing, your body doesn't allow you to write as quickly as you can type on a keyboard.

So that also changes the process of how we put words to paper.

Well, I think we all sort of complain sometimes about how the world seems to just be speeding up year after year.

And our technologies encourage that sense of with infinite scroll and all the things that we can do with them.

to make time not be located in place and not be slower.

But what it robs us of is downtime, time where we can daydream, let our minds wander.

And sitting and thinking and writing your thoughts forces you to really shape those thoughts in a way that you do differently on the screen.