P-p-pick up a pen! Writing by hand could help you to learn

How often do you write by hand? Like, with a pen and paper?

I watched a video of my four-year-old niece practising her letters last week, adding a dinky little curve onto her "a" and then aggressively dotting her "i". But how often will she actually need handwriting skills in the future? Why is she even learning how to write by hand when she'll probably be typing fluently by her teens?

I've always thought that writing by hand must have extra benefits for the brain. Despite being able to type much faster than I can write, I always take notes by hand because I find that it helps me to process what I'm learning more quickly.

That’s why, in meetings and during phonecalls, you'll find me scribbling away (in a cheap reporters' notebook with a black bic pen - medium nib, if you must know).

So I was interested to read a recent study, by two US professors of cognitive science, which found that writing by hand does indeed help people to learn certain skills faster.

In Brenda Rapp and Robert Wiley's experiment, three groups of people in the US were taught the Arabic alphabet in a different way: by writing, typing, or watching videos.

The research, which was published in Psychological Science at the end of June, showed that those in the writers group learned to recognise the letters much faster than those who had only typed the letters, or watched videos. The writers could also use their new knowledge to read unfamiliar words, and even spell words they hadn't read before.

Although the experiment sample size was small, these findings back up previous research, and the researchers say it shows that the act of handwriting does indeed offer extra benefits relating to reading, spelling and understanding.

"With writing," explains Robert Wiley, "you're getting a stronger representation in your mind that lets you scaffold toward these other types of tasks that don't in any way involve handwriting." That certainly sounds like what I experience when I scribble my notes (and later squint at them to work out what on earth I meant).

I'm not planning on learning to read and write Arabic any time soon, but it’s confirmed my belief that writing by hand is beneficial. I’ll certainly continue to do it, especially when I want to learn.

And hopefully, my little niece will, too.