Habits of Hand

Signature Moves: Are We Losing the Ability to Write by Hand? by Christine Rosen
The Guardian, January 21, 2025

Christine Rosen’s article "Signature Moves: Are We Losing the Ability to Write by Hand?” (an extract from her book The Extinction of Experience) is beautifully written and contains poignant reflections for educators. “However thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention,” she writes, “we inhabit a corporeal world.” Rosen examines the decline of handwriting as an analogue of the larger decline of physicality in our daily lives, noting, “Our choice of tools and the way we use them facilitates not only habits of hand but also habits of mind.” In other words, as teachers know well, how we learn is closely intertwined with what we learn. For example, “We retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to summarize as we write, as opposed to the greater speed of transcribing on a keyboard.” Rosen raises concern about “unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children” – and reminds us of “the vast evolutionary history that fitted us for physical movement and expression as a means of understanding our world.”