Does handwriting still matter

I went to school when there was no computer. We had to learn cursive writing (which I am told is actually called the Palmer method) and follow all the loops and hoops of each letter. Over summer vacations, the school used to have us fill up reams of notebooks with each page having words or phrases which we had to reproduce in the rest of the page. The traces of those years still shows up in my handwriting. All through primary school I dreamed of the day when I would be able to discard my pencils and start using a fountain pen.I struggled to get used to the fountain pen. It used to leak and stain my shirt. On the days of exams, I was given a spare fountain pen in case I ran out of ink. I never had enough to write especially during exams and so that scenario remained a figment of my imagination. Ballpoint pens were not permitted. The teachers were divided in their opinion if our handwriting would deteriorate because of the use of ballpoint pens. Our Math teacher didn’t care what pen I used as long as I got the arithmetic correct. The English teacher would penalize us if we did not use fountain pens. We all knew that those who had better handwriting scored just that little bit more because of their penmanship.Some psychologists were curious to see if two students wrote the same answer to a question, did poor handwriting put someone at a disadvantage? So they ran an experiment where a number of exam scripts were copied twice – once in good handwriting and once in bad handwriting. Two groups of examiners evaluated the scripts. They were specifically instructed to mark for content. Not surprisingly, the scripts with better handwriting scored significantly more.I never got to use a computer even during my post-graduation. Does it make sense to teach students penmanship (or should we call it pen-personship?) when everyone is constantly using the keyboard? Is there anything lost if we never teach children how to write?There is definitely evidence to suggest that writing something by hand helps us to retain that information better. It seems that “children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.”Students learn better when they take notes by hand. That is because it engages multiple senses and forces the person to focus. I am big fan of sketchnotes. That is a method of taking notes using visuals and some text to capture key ideas – say during a talk. I often use it to summarize an article.Or sometimes even a book – at least its key ideas.I have used a single sketchnote instead of a bunch of slides to support a presentation. <Like this one>The world is going more visual and a lot more global. Not knowing a language or not being able to read the script can delay the communication of ideas. Maybe it is time to teach students how to draw Sketchnotes in class.-----------Join me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduriRead: How the Ballpoint Pen Killed CursiveRead: What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades