Everything Old is New Again.

Didn't we suspect all those keyboards were doing us no good, especially the kiddies?

Read on the train on the way home tonight, in the Age today, an article about the (for some) forgotten art of penmanship and all the competitive advantages of occasionally picking up a pen rather than always keyboarding it. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, self-proclaimed progressive schools all over the country will be putting out shiny brochures that tout their brain-enhancing, quill and parchment sessions in conjunction with their usual brain-shrinking, advanced computer skills classes:

Educational research has concluded that handwriting skills increase brain activation and also stimulate the learning process. At the University of Stavanger in Norway, magnetic resonance imaging research established a cognitive link between the haptics of writing by hand and the activation of the brain's sensorimotor system. That is, students writing by hand remembered letters better than those typing on a keyboard.

Studies undertaken at the University of Washington determined that students wrote faster and in more complete sentences when writing by hand as opposed to writing using a keyboard.

That is, the correlation between better handwriting skills and improved academic performance in reading and writing can no longer be ignored.

Children who have the capacity to write fluently, legibly and automatically are better equipped to generate and evaluate ideas, judge responses and organise their thoughts. Indeed, poor handwriters struggle to write down their ideas and will quit the writing process sooner than those who write fluently.