Is handwriting doomed?

 Wired -  US public schools still require that kids be taught handwriting, so it’s not yet a lost art, but there is some evidence that digital natives are less “ready” for writing now than students in the past, says Karen Ray, a lecturer in occupational therapy at the University of Newcastle in Australia. In 2021, Ray coauthored a study examining whether kids who grew up with devices possessed the same fine motor skills as kids who did not. While those students met the expected performance levels on manual dexterity tests, their overall motor proficiency was lower than previous norms. Ultimately, the researchers hypothesized, time spent holding devices rather than pencils might be impacting whether kids had all the motor skills they needed to learn handwriting when they entered kindergarten.

But if kids always have access to devices, does it really matter whether they can write with their hands? Yes and no. If the past few years of digital nomad work and vibe coding have taught us anything it’s that, professionally, handwriting may not be all that necessary in a lot of fields. The problem is that learning handwriting might be necessary to learn everything else. “We don’t yet know what we are losing in terms of literacy acquisition by de-emphasizing handwriting fluency,” Ray says.

Among the half-dozen experts I spoke to for this piece, there were differences in opinion on whether moral panics over writing instruction were warranted. For example, in many states lawmakers have passed legislation to ensure kids learn cursive in US public schools. Some experts support this, but many don’t think learning cursive, specifically, is all that important. But nearly all agree that knowing how to write has cognitive benefits. It helps students learn to read, and chances are if they have to think about something long enough to write it down, they’ll remember it more thoroughly than if it’s typed.