Do you take notes by hand? 

Do you ever draft  an article by hand?

Time and indulgent editors permitting, it’s worth considering.

If you’re like most digitally savvy editors and reporters, you rarely write by hand.

The laborious process of tracing your thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past. Text messages and typed to do lists have replaced handwritten and sticky notes. 

Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency that boosts productivity. Imagine having to answer all your emails by longhand.

Writing by hand during a speech, court trial or anything else you’re covering can lead to better conceptual understanding and analysis.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is complicated. It requires your brain to monitor the pressure of each finger on the pen. Then your motor system has to modify that pressure to create each letter of the words in your head to paper.

Each of your fingers do something different to produce a recognizable letter,” Sophia Vinci-Booher, a Vanderbilt University educational neuroscientist, told science journalist Jonathan Lambert. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must process that letter as it’s formed. 

With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers to create the letters’ shapes. That’s not true for typing.

To type your fingers don’t have to trace the form of the letters. They just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to hand write than to type.

One of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it’s possible to type what you’re hearing. But often, “you’re not actually processing that information — you’re just typing in the blind,” she says. 

“If you take notes by hand, you can’t write everything down.”

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. 

“You make the information your own, which helps it stick in the brain.”

Such connections are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. 

“We’re foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it’s only natural that we’ve started using these other agents to do our writing for us.” 

It’s possible that this might free up our brains to do other kinds of hard thinking, she says.

We don’t have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. Research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as writing by hand on paper. 

To keep in practice, each morning I write 350 words by hand in my journal. It may be the only time that day I write by hand. Is that enough? Probably not but it’s part of my routine. 

Hemingway, Pyle and hundreds of other journalists and writers did it. Why not you?

Next: Always find the hidden motive

The above will appear in The Art of Compelling Writing, Volume 3, which is already in the works. Volumes 1 and 2 are available at Amazon.com. Volume 3 will appear this year. These books were published to help editors like you teach your reporters how to write well. Proceeds go to support adult literacy tutoring. You will help someone learn to read and write. To comment or with questions, please write JerryBellune@yahoo.com.