Handwriting Isn’t Dead—Smart Pens and Styluses Are Saving It

The Wall Street Journal:

Keyboards and touch screens may have turned our once-fine penmanship into a sloppy mess, but reports of the death of handwriting are premature. I can prove it: I wrote this entire column by hand.

Not once did I place my hands on my laptop, tablet or phone’s keyboard. Yet every word I scribbled was almost instantly transmitted to those devices.

Yes, the very technology that has put pen and paper on life support is now trying to save it.

…

“People who handwrite reframe the content, and understand it better. On a computer, they write it all down without thinking about it,” Pam Mueller, co-author of “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard,” a 2014 study published in Psychological Science, told me.

I also asked celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates why she still writes her novels in longhand. “Our handwriting is unique to us, like our fingerprints. It seems bizarre to me that anyone would wish only to ‘write’ via a keyboard in an impersonal idiom,” she replied to me (in an email).

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal