Can cursive writing solve your plot problem?

 

I’m a fast typer and giv­en a choice, that’s the meth­od of get­ting words on pa­per I’ll al­ways choose. But when I’m stuck and don’t know how to get a char­ac­ter from point A to B or ex­press my protagonist’s emo­tion­al state in an in­nov­at­ive way, I in­vari­ably get a piece of pa­per and a pen to sort things out.

Jotting down my thoughts by hand seems to spark a mul­ti­tude of ran­dom ideas. It might take a bit of time but even­tu­ally, my scribbles pave the way to a solution.

In the past, I thought I was just be­ing old school, fall­ing back on what I’d learned as a child. But google “hand­writ­ing versus typ­ing” and you’ll find sci­ence-based arti­cles pub­lished by Scientific American, PubMed Central, and the Swiss-based MDPI, as well as nu­mer­ous oth­er on­line peri­od­ic­als dis­cuss­ing the difference.

Studies con­duc­ted world-wide con­sist­ently re­veal that hand­writ­ing beats typ­ing when it comes to learn­ing, memory, prob­lem solv­ing, and cre­ativ­ity. Using brain scans while people were typ­ing or writ­ing by hand, sci­ent­ists no­ticed that sig­ni­fic­antly more areas of the brain lit up when a per­son was us­ing a pen or pen­cil on paper.

And when it comes to curs­ive versus print­ing, curs­ive leads every time. The broad­er spec­trum of cog­nit­ive activ­ity while writ­ing longhand, in­dic­ates deep­er thought and en­gage­ment with the ma­ter­i­al, which in turn, pro­motes ana­lyt­ic­al think­ing and cre­ativ­ity. And hope­fully more “Aha!” mo­ments when it comes to prob­lem solving.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to start writ­ing books or blogs in longhand. Typing is a valu­able skill, es­pe­cially for writers. And today’s tech­no­logy makes it in­cred­ibly easy to cor­rect spelling, punc­tu­ation, and gram­mar, as well as move, change, or de­lete text.

But I do plan to reach for pen and pa­per more quickly the next time I’m stuck. And this makes me won­der how wise it is for schools to drop curs­ive from their curriculums.