University professors are noticing a change in their students’ handwriting. “Each year that passes is worse, there are more students with bad handwriting,” observes Anna Bartra, professor of Catalan Philology at the UAB. It’s not a new comment. “You are often forced to assume good unintelligible phrases, after spending a while trying to figure out what they say,” confirms Juan Pablo Sanz, professor at the Universitat Abat Oliba CEU (UAO-CEU). “But it is also true that good handwriting has not completely disappeared.”
Lack of practice can lead to deformation of the handwriting. For a few years now, it has basically been learned and practiced in school. Even in high school, assignments are written on the computer. The time previously dedicated to handwriting is reduced starting in adolescence, to the detriment of the cognitive benefits that this practice had, but in favor of other gains.
“The habit of writing, which is acquired as children, is never lost,” reassures Ignacio Morgado, professor of Psychobiology at the UAB Neuroscience Institute. It’s like a bicycle, no matter how much it stops being used, you can ride it again. Another thing is the dexterity or discomfort of the saddle. “Look, I’ve got a callus,” a university student protested not long ago to his professor after an hour and a half of the exam.
“Like any habit, if it is not practiced, the speed and fluidity of the stroke will be lost,” continues Morgado, which can lead to a deformation of the letter. “But what adult now writes long texts by hand?” he asks. Indeed, the relationship between citizens and the administration or with companies is established through technological platforms. Friends are congratulated on the holidays via mobile phone. The pencil is taken for the shopping list, if one is not fond of writing diaries.
“With the pandemic, digitalization accelerated not only in universities but also in institutes, and that process, unfortunately, has not slowed down,” explains neuropsychologist Marina Fernández Andújar, professor at the UAO-CEU, for whom faculties will be lost. cognitive and will stop training will and effort. “Writing costs more than typing,” she adds.
To a large extent, the computer is already the usual means of communication in many faculties, although after the emergence of artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT, handwritten exams are returning. “At the UPC we ask for reports and reports by hand to avoid copying and pasting on the computer,” says Josep Pegueroles, researcher at the Higher Technical School of Telecommunications Engineering of Barcelona (ETSETB) of the UPC. He is very in favor of taking notes by hand because the effort involved in writing requires mental work that cannot be done if you only listen. “Also, they don’t answer their cell phones that way.”
Last Tuesday, a quick look at the tables in the Jaume Fuster library, in Plaça Lesseps, packed with students, shows that we no longer live in a world of exclusively manual writing. Laptops and papers coexist side by side, although among the latter, few are handwritten. Paradoxically, students in scientific and technological careers write in their own handwriting, while those in social sciences and humanities do so on a computer.
Anna (22 years old), a law student, is in front of a bound billet on which there are phrases underlined with bright colors. She types in class or takes notes from others and handles material that teachers post. In her opinion, it would be impossible to study all of this if it were handwritten.
Ro (23 years old), a Social Education student at the UB, takes notes by hand and on the computer, interchangeably. He doesn’t clean them up. “I don’t need it, I hardly take exams,” he justifies. Also, the career of Guillermo, a student of the Lenin degree (University of Mondragón), is so practical that his learning does not involve writing down theory. He writes, yes, comments on the agenda. “They are short sentences,” he says. As he places a lot of value on it, he works hard with his handwriting to the point that he believes that, now, his former teachers would praise his handwriting.
The quality of the handwriting, explain the professors consulted, can be guessed by the gender of the author, and in this comparison women clearly win: better handwriting, better presentation, better structuring of ideas. It would seem that the lyrics and the performance were also on par. “Although I have seen beautiful calligraphy with spectacular fictional narrative,” Sanz laughs when remembering it.
Carlos (18), future industrial engineer from the UPC, and Claudia (23), a Statistics student (UB/UPC), take notes by hand. They do this, they explain, because of the difficulty computers have in incorporating mathematical symbols. Also the Chemistry student, Rachele (20), who like the other two is in the library, takes notes by hand, only she does it with an electronic board connected to the laptop. Everything is automatically transcribed into a document.
Other students explain that they take notes cooperatively. This is the case of Alba (21), a journalism and business administration student at the UB. “Since I’ve been in college, I’ve never used a piece of paper. Already in high school I wrote on a computer,” she says. She now records classroom explanations in a joint Drive document with two friends. The three of them share class time. “Thus, two hours become shorter.” Value the time that she “does not waste.” And she doesn’t notice that her handwriting has changed.
The technology is also given other uses such as recording the teacher’s voice (which is not allowed on many campuses) which an application immediately transcribes into a computer document that the student polishes, eliminating useless words recorded, during class. Whoever applies this, recognizes that afterwards, before the exam, they have to study a little more than when they did it by hand and passed it on paper, because in that process “more was left.” But, like Alba, he values ??saving time and effort in the entire process.
“Notes are useful for reading, thinking, and studying,” says Enric Prats, vice dean of the Faculty of Education at the UB. The computer runs faster, but it simplifies useful processes.”
“It is difficult for me to understand how they take notes on the computer because they cannot make diagrams, include asterisks to highlight, join paragraphs with arrows…,” reflects UAB History professor Ignasi Fernández Terricabra, who warns that in universities in other countries They only use laptops. “I’m not against technology, but if you have everything at hand (emails, news, websites…), it’s easy to get distracted and lose attention.”
“When I want them to retain an essential concept I tell them: ‘I need you to pay attention to me in the next 10 minutes. Leave your cell phones and lower the lids of your laptops,’” explains the UAO-CEU professor.
Fernández Terricabra also relates computer use to the difficulty in reading long texts. This is a lament shared by all the teachers consulted. Little is read. Adapted books are suggested, footnotes are eliminated so that they are not rejected. The suggested bibliographies are barely attended to. “If you ask for a phrase that captures the essence of a text, they don’t write it, they copy a fragment.”
“Now we make everything easier for them,” considers Barta, who, more than the loss of quality of handwriting, is concerned about misspellings, impoverished vocabulary, the good presentation of a work and the poor habit of reading. “We post graphs, maps, photos, notes, perhaps we make things too easy.”
Daniel Cassany, a professor assigned to the UPF, does not mourn the calligraphic decline. He believes that it was never valued aesthetically like in Asian countries and that many current students know fonts from other languages. He believes that times have changed and that it is more important to know how to detect a hoax or distinguish a reliable source. “Before, calligraphy was important because it was part of your presentation, now you construct your identity in a different way,” he adds. In his opinion, writing is being “refitted” to the various existing learning records (podcasts, videos, etc.) that young people value.
Morgado also sees the technology that all older adults have become accustomed to as a sign of the times. He believes that, in any case, a dependency is generated (you always have to carry a device). “Nothing is going to happen to the brain.” he concludes. And he gives a recommendation to young people: reserve the manuscript for the emotional. “Give writings in your handwriting to your loved ones,” he tells them.
