Extract from ABC News
Experts say there is still a place for handwriting in schools. (ABC News: Patrick Rocca)
By all metrics, handwriting is going the way of the dodo.
Schools across the country, and the world, are increasingly moving away from traditional pen and paper work and toward a system incorporating an endless array of technology and digital devices.
Indeed, the biggest-ticket item for many families returning to school is a laptop or tablet.
The days of copybooking and cursive lessons are behind us.
So why is handwriting dying out, and what effects will it have on how people learn and live?
A handwritten love letter written by Nance Hooper to her husband Alan during World War II. (Supplied: State Library of Queensland)
The history of written thought
The State Library of Queensland maintains voluminous archives of written work over the decades, including war correspondence, personal letters, and the diaries of young people.
Gavin Bannerman is director of memory at the library, and said the story of handwriting was the story of communication for hundreds of years.
An 1825 letter by NSW attorney-general Saxe Bannister from the Library's Colonial Secretary's Correspondence collection. (Supplied: State Library of Queensland)
"The history of pen and paper, there's a dependency between handwriting and literacy," Mr Bannerman said.
"It's only really in the last 200 years that the majority of the population could read and write.
"And what reading and writing means was very different in the 1800s compared to now, because our technologies for communication are so different."
The library's collection exhibited the way people altered how they communicated depending on who they were trying to communicate with, Mr Bannerman said.
Letters and official communications had a "tightness" and efficiency to them, he said, which was very different to the more "loose" way people wrote their diaries.
"They're all done in somebody's hand. And what that hand is … and how that hand appears to us generations later was influenced by lots of things like their social standing," Mr Bannerman said.
A WWII diary entry by young woman Daphne Baetz on the day Japan surrendered shows the "loose" style of personal diaries. (Supplied: State Library of Queensland)
He said the move from physical mediums to the digital space made archival efforts more complicated for organisations like the library.
"But I think it also is a lack of diversity of thought … different thoughts arise through different mechanics of putting your words down."
A lot of what is being lost through the decline of handwriting, Mr Bannerman said, is the intangible and subjective allure of ritual and physicality.
"You hear authors say they like to write their first rough-and-ready manuscript in a particular way, which might be different from how they answer emails," he said.
"There's a ritual to it. The smell of the paper kind of readies them for the creative process.
"There is something about the physicality of doing that, the ritual of doing that, which helps them collect their thoughts in a busy, fractured kind of world."
Writing and learning
A recent peer-reviewed study of existing literature in the scientific journal Life compared the effects of handwriting and typing on a person's brain.
It found while typing was faster and more convenient, handwriting engaged a broader group of brain regions, improving memory retention and learning.
Beryl Exley is a professor of English curriculum at Griffith University, and said handwriting needed to find its place in a crowded agenda for school kids.
Beryl Exley says handwriting slows down learning processes, allowing information to be better absorbed. (ABC News: Mark Leonardi)
"It's not so much that handwriting has fallen off the agenda, it's that a lot more things have come onto the agenda," Dr Exley said.
While handwriting and typing both involve fine motor control, memory, and language, Dr Exley said, the true difference is in the pace.
"When we [write by hand], we actually slow down our thinking," Dr Exley said.
"And that's actually considered to be a good thing, because it allows the cognition of what we're working with to actually move through the visual processes, move through the physical processes of handwriting, and it allows us to have that time to think about the content that we're writing about."
The handwriting of a year five student in 1999 shows the hallmarks of traditional penmanship. (Supplied: State Library of Queensland)
Children needed a hybrid model of learning incorporating handwriting instruction and technology, Dr Exley said, because the modern world requires varied skills.
"They need to develop confidences and competencies in both handwriting and in expressing themselves through the digital medium," she said.
"It's not that one replaces the other, it's that more comes onto their plate.
"But as teachers, we're really interested in … what are the apparatus and what are the tools and cognitive and physical processes that weave together that give us the best outcomes."
Cutting out handwriting entirely was a flawed approach to the modern world, Dr Exley said.
"The cognitive processes are different, and what we find with handwriting is that it enhances learning retention. It fosters the development of fine motor skills essential for life," she said.
She said replacing the "deeper thinking time" involved with handwriting with "twitch speed, surface level" work on digital devices would harm students' ability to maintain focus over time.
"There's going to be a shift in students' capacity to think deeply, independently, because they've not had a long and nourished apprenticeship in what slow, deep thinking looks or feels like," she said.
Schools across the country, and the world, are increasingly moving away from traditional pen and paper work. (ABC News: Brooke Chandler)
When things are getting messy on the screen, Dr Exley moves back to pen and paper.
"Doing it on pen and paper is slowing down my thinking, and it's actually allowing me to just get some clarity of thought that I wasn't able to get with the busyness of the digital interface," she said.
"But we also need to have that efficiency and confidence and competence with the digital interface, because we also know that it serves a different function and it does allow us to do things that handwriting won't allow us to do."
Thousands of examples of historical handwriting can be found on the State Library of Queensland's catalogue.
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