How Writing by Hand Helps You Get Better at Learning

And Why Journaling with Pen and Paper Is One Great Option to Start Priming Your Brain for Optimum Learning

Your hands and your brain have always been working together to bolster your retention and memory to make you a better learner.

Learning should be anything but a drag. Personal and professional growth hinge on what you know and the depth of that knowledge. Is it knowledge that is firmly anchored by profound understanding? When you say you know something, do you mean you truly understand it, or do you just know of it?

Learning should be meaningful, not to mention fun—something the stupendous amount of information available online makes almost tricky. But it’s worth the effort to strive for it, because of, well, the benefits. Substantial ones.

Learning experts (neurophysiologists, psychologists, therapists, etc.) have been investigating the undeniable relationship between writing by hand and the quality of learning. Studies on the subject have been carried out in locations as far apart as Indiana University in the USA, the University of Marseille in France, and the University of Stavanger in Norway.

In these studies, scientists compared writing by hand and writing using a keyboard. Researchers Marieke Longchamp and Jean-Luc Velay, working out of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, studied 76 children aged 3-5 to determine how writing by hand and typing affect their cognitive process. The children who learned to write letters by hand were better at recognizing them than the group who learned by typing them on a computer. When they conducted the same experiment on adult subjects, teaching them Bengali or Tamil characters, they got the similar results.

Reading letters we have learned through handwriting activates regions of the brain different from those activated when we recognize letters we learned by typing them on a keyboard. The motions we make writing by hand leave a motor memory in our brain’s sensorimotor part, and that makes the difference.

In his Psychology Today article, neuroscience professor William Klemm identifies multiple tasks that writing by hand requires the brain to perform: locate individual strokes relative to others; learn and remember each letter’s appropriate size, slant of global form, and characteristic feature detail; and develop categorization skills.

In her book Studies in Inclusive Education; A Clumsy Encounter: Dyspraxia and Drawing (2011), Claire Penketh points out the following prerequisites we need to fulfill when we draw and write: visual processing and sensory integration (vision, touch), combined with manual dexterity (skilled hand movement) required to put pen to paper, including eye-hand coordination.

All these things that our brain must fulfill will benefit it immensely, making it the highly functioning machine that it was always supposed to be. The kind we need to be productive and able to perform any given task with relative ease. This is how we may become pros at what we set out to learn initially perhaps just for fun or just out of sheer necessity. Either way, we end up enriching our lives.

Ready to unplug? Here’s an idea: why not start a learning journal? Get to know yourself just a tad bit better by journaling about your learning endeavors. Let the clutter drop away and start creating meaningful learning experiences for yourself, by your own hand.