These past couple of years, as I’ve begun to take the craft of writing more seriously, I’ve found that writing by hand tends to make me more thoughtful and more engaged in the writing process. Also, when I compose ideas for stories on paper, I tend to have better recall of those ideas than those I tap out on a computer, smartphone notes app, or tablet.
Now there’s some research that supports the idea that writing by hand helps us remember.
Popular Science reported recently about a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology that suggests writing by hand improves our ability to remember whatever it is we’re writing about. According to the researchers, “whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity.”
“In other words: Writing by hand, as opposed to with a keyboard, helps you remember things,” writes Justin Pot in the Popular Science story.
“Though a small sample size, the results ‘revealed increased connectivity for handwriting over typewriting, suggesting that different underlying cognitive processes are involved in the two tasks,'” Pot writes.
“This makes sense to me,” he continues. “I can type without looking at the keyboard, or even really thinking about the fact that I’m typing. Writing with a pen, though? That I have to pay attention. That’s a meaningful distinction, one that has implications for anyone who is trying to learn.”
I’ve written here before about my morning journaling routine, which involves writing a page or two or three in longhand. I’ve been writing more drafts of short stories that way as well recently, or creating frameworks of stories, or essays, or poetry.
Good news for keyboard composers — and bloggers like me. (Most of my blogging is composed by tapping away on a computer keyboard. Rarely do I write a blog post by hand before entering it into WordPress.)
The pen, it seems, is not necessarily mightier than the keyboard — “they’re just different tools for different jobs,” Pot writes.
Image via Pexels.
Andy writes! 
When I was a teenager, my acting mentor told me about a study that showed people remembered more when they wrote something out (even if they never looked at the note again) verses just trying to cognitively remember what they needed to. The process of writing involved more memories: the memory of being told to remember the thing, the memory of writing the thing, and the visual memory of seeing what you had written. It’s fascinating how the mind uses different methods of remembering.
Yes, the mind truly is fascinating, and I agree that writing stuff down helps cement an idea in our memory even if we never look at the note again. Your acting mentor was spot on.