That’s right, it’s savvy to write: Trade your keyboard for a pen

I’m only 20 years old, and I’m already reminiscing about old times. Whatever happened to passing your friends folded notes with quirky messages scrawled on them? 

There’s something intimate about a handwritten letter with which no amount of emojis can compete.

Last Tuesday, journalist Melissa Ludtke spoke to my Women in Journalism class. Ludtke is best known as the reporter who made it possible for female journalists to enter baseball locker rooms following a 1978 lawsuit against the commissioner of baseball. For the sake of their careers, she expressed a desire for young people to write things physically again — to actually buy paper, sit down and write — rather than type something up.

I agree with Ludtke on the personal touch of a handwritten note. But many of my millennial peers are constantly connected with the Internet and have no qualms about trading a journal for a Word document, or a card for a Facebook wall post.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that we burn our computers and keyboards and contribute to paper waste in a quest for more snail mail. Our generation has an equal obsession with cutting down on paper and becoming more environmentally conscious. At Pitt, we’ve eliminated plastic bags and are taking steps to reduce receipt paper. It would be ludicrous to use pen and paper for everything. Still, we need to strike a balance.

Research and experts suggest that the pen might be mightier than the keyboard.

Since 2013, American elementary schools have required children to learn writing in print and typing. Students now face higher expectations of technological savviness than my generation did, no more than 15 years ago. Since Common Core State Standards dropped cursive writing from its teaching requirements, U.S. elementary schools resultantly stopped teaching handwriting. While print persists, it’s only a matter of time before schoolchildren trade in their handwritten name tags for a technologically designed label.

While progress isn’t inescapably cumbersome, eliminating regular handwriting in favor of pressing keys might not be entirely beneficial. 

Marieke Longchamp and Jean-Luc Velay, two researchers at the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, conducted a study of 76 children, ages three to five. Some children were taught letters by typing letters, and others learned their letters by hand. The group that learned letters by physically writing them remembered them better. The researchers used adults in a repeat experiment where they learned foreign languages like Bengali. The results were similar.

When physically writing something, you stimulate your reticular activating system (RAS), a network of neurons found in the brain stem. The RAS is involved in two seemingly disparate functions, sexual behavior and sleep. Mainly, the RAS works to pushcertain items into your consciousness.

The RAS filters what you’re focusing on at the moment, whether it’s a study guide or a love note. This portion of your brain is only the size of a pinky finger, but when you physically form letters by hand, whatever is on your mind becomes your whole brain’s focus.

Writing by hand will hook your reader, too. I might over-romanticize language, but every time I see someone’s handwriting for the first time, I feel like I’m becoming acquainted with a new part of his or her identity. If the eyes are the portal to the soul, then handwriting is the gateway to the brain.

Author Patrick E. McLean expresses this sentiment in a poetic dissertation on Lifehacker, a daily weblog on software and programming. He notes that physical writing is not typically susceptible to distractions in the way that virtual writing can be. 

“A pen and paper has but one functionality. It captures the marks I make so that they can be referred to at a later time. It doesn’t ring. It doesn’t bother me with an incoming chat or IM. It never asks me to plug it in so it can get more power,” he wrote in a post on Lifehacker in 2010.

As for preserving the art, there is already a lot of damage. A 2012 survey commissioned by the British company Docmail found that, on average, one in three respondents had not written anything by hand in the previous six months.

When Ludtke was in her twenties, she applied to be a researcher-reporter for Sports Illustrated. She was not hired — but also not conquered. Ludtke previously worked for ABC Sports in a “gofer” position, but the network would not hire her full-time. While still at ABC, she traveled to different sporting events for work and sent a cascade of postcards to Sports Illustrated. In Ludtke’s opinion, her handwritten momentos were the reason Sports Illustrated hired her. 

But never mind all of the empirical data and expert opinions. It’s refreshing to see someone’s personal penmanship. I can’t remember the last time someone other than a teacher wrote me a letter, though. Regrettably, it seems to be going out of fashion more quickly than cursive.

“With handwriting, we come closer to the intimacy of the author,” Roland Jouvent, head of adult psychiatry at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, said. I could not agree more — handwriting tells another story all its own, separate from the actual content. Eraser marks, rips and the soft, gray remnants of old ideas linger alongside the final product. There’s a story there — a tale of envisioning and re-envisioning that you just don’t see on a word processor.

I’m not advocating that we revert to paper-only communications — that would just be unproductive. It’s wasteful to write every memo on paper, and some information just isn’t important enough to exist outside the confines of a computer screen. 

If your message possesses enough merit, though, dust off your pen and paper. Taking the sheer time and initiative to craft your voice through the written word could make all the difference in a world obsessed with streamlining and standardizing. 

Courtney Linder is the Assistant Opinions Editor of The Pitt News and primarily writes on social issues.

Write to Courtney at cnl13@pitt.edu.