Essay Sample: The Benefits of Writing by Hand
It is not uncommon nowadays for people to turn away from, if not completely reject, the old-fashioned technique of writing by hand. After all, why shouldn’t they? Most these days have access to these beautiful things called computers: fast, neat, and easy to use … Instead of erasers, there is a nice, quick button—delete. Instead of messy handwritings, there are countless fonts at hand. Instead of gripping a pen or pencil for hours, everything we want to say can be written in a click of a few keys. However, there are a few reasons why many, including Allegra Goodman, advocate for the traditional pen and paper.
The first benefit of writing by hand is that it reduces the majority of distractions. Think about it: a blank piece of paper, versus a laptop dinging with notifications every minute or so. To begin with, laptops are filled with temptations—whether what’s luring people is a tetris game or an instagram post, they will find it hard to resist. With paper, however, the possibility of interruptions are eliminated almost totally. According to recent research by Gloria Mark, in collaboration with Microsoft, found out that the average individual is “distracted or interrupted every 40 seconds when working in front of a computer,” whether for a short or long period of time. In addition, when ResearchGate conducted a study on cyberslacking and procrastinating, they found that their subjects — the average age being 29 — spent roughly 53% of their time actually doing their work. Furthermore, writing by hand definitely requires more mental focus than typing, forcing people into concentration. One study from Norway in 2020 compared brain activity in handwriting, drawing, and typing. They found that, “areas of the brain correlated with working memory and encoding new information were more active during handwriting,” quoting CTV News.
Secondly, handwriting makes writing seem more like a personal practice rather than work. As Goodman describes it, “[it] doesn’t feel like work; it feels like secret diaries and treasure maps and art.” Handwriting comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, each representative of the writer’s personality or mood. It does not conform, every letter unique to the writer, just like fingerprints.
Third and finally, writing by hand allows people much more freedom than writing through the computer. It encourages people to try out a diversity of expressive phrases, and shows the process of drafting and editing. Firstly, computers, and their writing extensions, immediately censor out grammatically incorrect phrases, wrong spelling, and awkward phrasing or diction. These are problems as casual phrases in dialogue may sometimes be inaccurate in terms of writing rules, thus being crossed out; spelling errors that might have been there to express sound would be altered; and weirdly put wording for writer’s style or for character development would be replaced with “proper” word choices. For example, I had wanted to write a piece of dialogue for an uncomfortable, shy teenager in my story only a few days ago. However, my laptop instantly sensed that something was not right and fixed it for me. When I went back to read the story over, I realized the dialogue did not serve the purpose I had wanted it to be, undoubtedly due to the efforts of my “perfect,” yet too robotic laptop .. Moving on, handwriting lets others and the writer go through the steps of how an essay came to be. Notes and thoughts that came to mind, eraser marks, crossed out sentences, extra phrases jotted down, etc would be raw proof of the work put into a text—and although messier, would show the vivacity, the natural, original state of the writer’s mind.
