Loving Handwriting (Again)

Calligrapher Tom Gourdie wrote in Improve Your Handwriting that any handwriting that deteriorates at speed is useless. I remember working through his book when I was at university in the UK — basically he was advocating for a monoline italic, where some letters are joined but others aren’t, depending on where they sit in the word — the aim always being efficiency/speed without sacrificing legibility. (This is different than the cursive children are/were taught in the U.S., where every single letter is supposed to be joined up, a legacy of Spencerian/copperplate and modified and developed into the Palmer method, now largely discarded as students, if they write by hand at all, mostly print.) My own handwriting was transformed under Gourdie’s gentle prodding and I still write like this; in fact seeing handwriting from when I was at school is jarring to me now.

There is nothing like the tactile pleasure of writing with a good (not necessarily expensive) fountain pen on good, smooth paper. I am a fast typist. I am also (undiagnosed) ADHD, and could type out complicated philosophical ponderings while thinking about my shopping list. Writing by hand slows down my monkey brain and demands sequential thought. (When word processors came into common use in the late 1980s, the average length of book manuscripts went up by a third, at least those submitted to the Harvard University Press where I used to work; when cutting and pasting is easy, people do it instead of thinking through their ideas beforehand.)

Various studies have shown that there is different cognitive process between writing and typing, and that writing wins the cognitive battle, as described in this recent paper:

Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.
bq. —Marano et al., “The Neuroscience Behind Handwriting: Handwriting vs. Typing — Who Wins the Battle?” (Life (Basel), February 2025).

There’s more, of course. I recently realized that most of the jobs I’ve done in my life can already, or will soon, be done by artificial intelligence, a sobering thought. I have already disengaged from popular social media outlets because my drawings, such as they were, were being used without my permission to train AI. I am in no doubt whatsoever that every key stroke I make is somehow being monitored, studied, and spat out into an algorithm for something. So far, they haven’t figured out a way to track what I’m writing by fountain pen, though there are certainly pens available that can convert handwriting to typewritten text as you go.