The Slow Art of Handwriting: Why Handwriting Still Matters in the Digital Age

Let us imagine that you’ve had a particularly busy couple of months. Maybe you’ve had exams, felt crushed by your work, or had your heart ripped out by love, and you just need an outlet for expression. Modernity would tell you to power up your laptop, open a virtual page, and start writing – after all, it’s more functional, faster, and practical. Yet, if you were to find yourself talking to a humanist philosopher, you might just be convinced to trade scrolling for scribbling and bathe in the power of pen on paper. 

What Humanism Teaches Us About Writing by Hand

The humanist philosophy, or humanism, is said to have originated with Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch, who played a titular role in inspiring a shift towards Renaissance humanism and human potential. Put simply, it is a philosophy that values people, their power to consider, learn, and change.

Humanists believe that humans should endeavour to do things with meaning that can connect us with a deeper purpose or knowledge. 

We may live physically in the present, but we are often mentally preoccupied with the future. So focused on the final outcomes and results that we forget that most of our lives are about the journey to getting the things we want. Typing, while often necessary in the digital age, is done mostly for functionality and speed, rather than for the experience itself.

Handwriting takes time, time we often feel we don’t have, where you must be present in the moment. More than this, the way we write is unique only to us. Like your signature, your handwriting is your own; it is your mark; it is reminiscent of how you learnt to curl your letters as a child, it is your inky fingerprint. One could argue that to write is to engage with your unique humanness. 

Digital Detox: A Privilege Worth Exploring

Humanism is particularly relevant in the 21^st century, where technological expectations are pushing us further and further towards uniformity, as we arguably lose some of our individual humanity. The average person spends 6 hours and 40 minutes per day on screens, which is unsurprisingly linked to eye strain, disrupted sleeping patterns, and lower levels of mental well-being. 

Sure, screen time can be fun, and it is often required of us, but shouldn’t we seize any opportunity to slow down and engage ourselves in the act of something, rather than just the result?

Humans have used language for exploration since the beginning of our existence. From cave drawings to literature, we yearn for expression. We have lost a little (or a lot) of our slowness, and now live our lives rapidly, always focused on building for the future. Let’s say you wanted a coffee from your local coffee shop, even though you know driving there would save you time, the quarter-hour walk in the sun may just do you more good.

As much as we need to be prepared for the future, we still should try to enjoy each day and embrace a little slow living. Find beauty in voyage, in task, close your laptop screens and open your journal. Undeniably, it is a privilege to be able to separate ourselves from our technologies, in a world so demanding of us. Nonetheless, to quote an undeniably cliché piece of advice: you’ll never know unless you try.

The Case for Humanism and Handwriting in the Digital Age

Scientific studies on memory and retention of information deem physically writing letters and notes to be more effective than typing them. You are more connected to the act itself and must learn to engage with the information more than if you were typing on a laptop. Our brains do not all learn in one, linear way.

Some students learn better through drawing diagrams, brainstorming, and highlighting. A piece of paper is a blank canvas. You can choose how to design your learning, and you have the power to desire and design in a way that a computer does not always permit.  Writing, to some degree, also allows room for more critical thinking. Like asking ChatGPT to write you an essay, sometimes digitalizing a task removes the most critical aspect – the learning. 

Famous painter Leonardo da Vinci was also a follower of the humanist philosophy, deeply interested in the world and what he could learn from it. Like other humanists, da Vinci was passionate about understanding the world through purposeful study and observation, devoting himself to the art of study. This means limiting shortcuts, not AI-generating the outcome, but learning from the process itself.

Our handwriting tells us secrets about ourselves, a laptop cannot – how and why our writing changes through certain emotions, the way we scribble when we really, truly feel something. Da Vinci spent countless hours learning his craft, and by doing so, literally created new art techniques like sfumato or chiaroscuro. These processes were derived from his humanist focus on method, the slowness of learning, even when the outcome was unknown. 

The philosophy of humanism questions why we should limit ourselves when we do not know the confines of our creativity and forces us to interrogate our instinct to reach for the screens.  The curvature of the ink speaks more than letters on a keyboard, and it may just be time to listen.