Typing v Handwriting
Interesting article from Anabela Mapique and Deborah Pino Pasternak over on The Conversation today about the need for Australian students to perhaps learn more typing skills and have less of a focus on handwriting practice.
This certainly fits with my philosophy that all writing undertaken by students should be practical and authentic.
“Overall, students spent an average of 143 minutes per week writing texts using paper and pen or pencil. They spent an average of 57 minutes per week writing using a digital device.”
Those numbers certainly don’t reflect the writing undertakings of the average Australian worker, meaning schools aren’t properly preparing kids for real-world writing.
Editing is certainly much easier to perform on a computer, with writers able to move around whole paragraphs, change words several times, insert new sentences or take out other passages. Students really struggle with how “messy” a piece of writing starts to look with a bit of editing. They can easily lose track of what they’ve actually written or committed to, and can quickly abandon editing altogether once there’s no more room on the page to facilitate it. A digital document doesn’t have this challenge.
Check out this free lesson plan on editing.
I’m also massively in favour of the flexibility of digital writing, be it comic strips, voice recordings, or the different ways writing might be presented via a powerpoint or a website. I’m all in on texts like Adam Wallace’s Hatman being the future of literacy, combining traditional writing, comics, QR codes, videos, song, and hyperlinks. It makes even more sense that information texts, be they news articles or other reports, would be searchable and linkable, and the curriculum has, for a while now, acknowledged that students need to be familiar with how to read and interact with digital texts. If we’re not allowing students to create their own texts of these kinds, then we’re ommitting a key element of effective teaching.
On the flip side, young writers need to understand their craft before expanding, rather than relying on ‘the computer’ to do most of the work for them. Spelling and grammar will always be important aspects of effective communication, and, as we’re seeing with the increasing (mis)use of AI, if students don’t know what they’re aiming for, they’re very likely to trust autocorrect with a wrong correction.
I was always taught that technology should enhance learning, not substitute, and there’s nothing that can be done better on a computer when it comes to learning new words and how to form sentences.
There’s also nothing like a fresh sheet of paper and a sharp pencil to both learn and experiment with writing.
“Studies using brain imaging have shown that handwriting engages more areas of the brain associated with creativity and critical thinking”
I know plenty of authors who prefer to work first by hand, then perform a first edit while transcribing it to the computer.
They will tell you that there’s more space to think about what’s being written, though this is countered by how slow handwriting can feel when you’re in a great flow state and just want to get the words out before they’re lost.
At the end of the day, I’d encourage you to incorporate more typing, and computers in general, into writing and literacy lessons. There’s a reason we invented the typewriter. But there’s also a reason the alphabet and the comma didn’t change with that invention.
