Does Handwriting Matter Anymore?

Yes.

From an extract in a new book, The Missing Link, care of the Guardian...

Here is a story about how handwriting can still be important, and why we shouldn't let it go. In the university where I teach, one undergraduate creative module contains a specific task, a "writer's notebook". The students have to make notes on all sorts of things – observations, passing fancies, plot ideas, scribbled asides, as well as sketches and drafts of poems, short stories, perhaps bits of drama. When I explain this task to the students, invariably someone says, "Can I type it all on the computer and hand it in because I can't write any other way?" I give in, having been instructed that I have to, but I do encourage students to write as much as they can by hand. It makes you think, I say. It looks less permanent. It has more of you in it. Most students, even now, take this advice and do produce volumes which are full of work written by hand, notes and thoughts and inventions both casual and highly developed. When they have been a student's constant companion over four months or so, they are, I have to say, a total joy.

Last month a student of mine died, quite suddenly. It was a terrible shock to everyone who knew her: she was a grand girl all round. She had done this module, and had produced a fat notebook in which every word was written by hand – you would recognise her handwriting as soon as you knew her. It bulged with invention, and cutouts, and marginalia, and massive crossings-out, and all manner of things. After I heard that she had died, I went down to the cellar where these things are stored and extracted her writer's notebook from the archive.

It was just full of her. You could see where her pen had moved across the page, only months before; you could see her good creative days and the days where nothing much had come; you could see what she had written quickly, in inspiration, and the bits she had gone over and over. I only taught her, but I was moved by it, and felt a connection with the poor girl, whom I had liked a great deal.