Extract from The Guardian
Knowing that someone held a pen to write the words in a letter elevates the correspondence far beyond something sent via phone or computer.
Recently, I found a letter my mum had written me years ago when she was on holidays in Vietnam. The paper is thin and ratty on the edges, but the handwriting and the turn of phrase is unforgettably hers. In looping, cursive black ink, she has described pages and pages of wondrous observations about her travels, immediately transporting me to another place and another time. If this had been sent as an email, it might have been lost in the endless updating of laptops and operating systems. But because it was a letter, I added it to a box in the cupboard some years ago, knowing I would want to read it again and again and again.
Letters like these become even more valuable after someone dies, when you go hunting for a record of their voice. And knowing that the person held a pen to write the words elevates the correspondence far beyond something sent via phone or computer. But it is not just the words they write or the expressions they use; it is also the very particular form their lettering takes. I can recognise the bulbous, slightly rounded N that my mum always used, remembering all those times I tried to forge her signature and failed dismally. Her handwriting, like that of my dad’s and of my grandparents, was distinctive, as much their signature as their name.
I rarely receive letters these days, and write them even less. I write almost entirely on a laptop and am lucky if I scribble out a barely legible shopping list (and even they are often typed on my phone these days). But when I was at school, in an era predating digital technology, we wrote everything by hand. We sat for our pen licence and, if we failed, had to keep using pencils until we could form our letters legibly and on the line. Now many children are spending much of their day on computers, and much of their learning is being done not with a pencil but with a keyboard.
It may be easier for students to write on a keyboard, and many enjoy being able to correct their work immediately and learn from spelling and grammar apps when their sentences do not take the suggested form, but I fear we may be losing something. When I am not working as a writer, I run writing workshops in schools. It used to be that students would panic if they made a mistake when handwriting and then use whiteout to make changes as they went, and I would try to encourage them just to cross it out and keep going, telling them it was their first draft. Now, in most of the workshops I run, many students are working directly on to computers, unless I give them planning sheets that they have to do by hand.
I met a year 6 boy whose writing was as neat as a typeset page. He told me that at the country primary school he had gone to before he moved, the students all had to sit for their pen licence, and that most days they spent hours writing by hand. What struck me about this, aside from the fact that I was more drawn to his story because I could read it easily, was that in comparison to so many students typing on a keyboard, I could see where he had crossed out mistakes and fixed them. And most importantly his sentences were not in the dictated form of a grammar app but, rather, an expression of his own. Imperfect, incomplete, rambling and sometimes lyrical. Amazingly, he had found his own voice, and that was almost impossible to teach in a creative writing exercise.
We know there are many benefits to writing by hand. We know that it aids and shapes creativity. We know that it improves memory. We know that taking notes by hand rather than on a computer allows us to process the information more deeply. And we know that handwriting is a tool to represent personality. My own is messy and scribbled, a sort of shorthand that can’t be scrawled fast enough sometimes when my head is full of ideas.
If we continue on this path of primarily using keyboards to write, I also wonder how we will archive our lives for the future. Perhaps others are more organised than I am, but sadly I haven’t kept precious emails sent to me from parents, friends, and lovers, but letters are treasured in my house. From the notes passed back and forth in high school to the first attempts at declarations of love, to the sweet cards my children made me when they were young, I can trace my history through the handwriting of others and remember moments in my life that I had long forgotten.
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