Writing by hand has become a long lost friend. People have stopped doing it because of the invasion of technology. We choose to write on a keyboard instead of with a pen. Which is a shame, really. Writing by hand has many benefits you probably hadn’t even thought of.
Our own mental gym
It’s important we get back to it, as it’s great mental-gym. We used to take notes, write birthday cards, letters, and so much more, all by hand. Now, it has just come down to a short WhatsApp message or a Facebook post.
Writing something down in pen or pencil is a more complex task than doing it with a keyboard. It doesn’t exactly benefit our brains, as we’re not actively training it anymore.
Brain-training
When using one hand to hold a pen or a pencil, and the other one to hold the paper, what we do is activate the psychomotor functioning of the eye-hand coordination.
It’s also a cognitive job for your memory. Out of the millions of words we know, we choose the exact ones we need to express precisely what we mean. With them, we form sentences and coherent arguments.
Thinking about grammar and distribution
Plus, we have to actively think about the grammar of what we write. We also have to keep in mind the distribution of what we write on the paper, in terms of space and margins. Writing by hand has many aspects we have to think about that keep our minds awake.
Improving language management
Writing by hand allows us to learn better, because we retain the information more easily. At the same time, it stimulates our ability to properly handle language as we keep thinking about how to put things into words best.
Writing on paper also improves our concentration skills, because we have to focus on what we are writing, and how. Especially when you don’t exactly have the neatest handwriting. Keeping a readable handwriting is not the easiest of tasks, even more so if someone else is supposed to read what we’ve jotted down.
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