BBC News 

The writing of many healthcare professionals is hard to understand to the extent that they have even pushed many Brazilian states to pass laws that require doctors to type prescriptions on computers or, at least, write them clearly with no abbreviations.

But what explains the shape of our handwriting? And why do some people have perfect handwriting, while others write as if they cannot write anything that a person can read at all?

Anthropologist Monika Saini, professor in the Department of Social Sciences at India’s National Institute of Health and Family Welfare, said that handwriting requires coordination between the eyes and motor skills.

“I would say that handwriting is one of the most complex skills that human beings have developed,” she told the BBC World Service CrowdScience programme.

“Writing depends on utensils and our hands. And when we think of hands, we are talking about something that is very delicate, made up of 27 bones, which are controlled by more than 40 muscles, most of them in the arm and connected to the fingers by a complex network of tendons,” she explained.

This means that our handwriting is partly influenced by our anatomy and the genetic characteristics we inherit from our parents.

In other words: your height, the way you sit, the angle of your notebook or paper, the firmness of your hand, whether you are right- or left-handed… All of this influences the shape of the letters and words we produce.

But there is some cultural influence that cannot be ignored. It is at home, in early childhood, that we learn to hold a pencil or pen, with the help of our elders.

The way they use these utensils, they pass it on when the child takes their first strokes with a pencil.

Then school comes into play – and a new wave of influence from teachers and classmates enters the matter.

As the years go by, our writing will continue to change. One of the reasons is because, after years of training and learning, many of us start to write less on a daily basis.

And lack of habit, combined with the rush of everyday life, can make us less attentive to the way we write letters, syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs…

We cannot also ignore the role of new technologies, which make us type more than we write by hand.

Our first writing is influenced by the way our elders teach us to hold the material.

As part of one of her research projects, Ms Saini wanted to get a better understanding of the most important factors in a person’s handwriting.

To do this, she prepared a simple text on climate change and asked a group of volunteers to copy the sentences and use the writing style they knew very well.

After they collected the papers, the anthropologist could assess elements like the size of the letters, shape of each symbol, the space between words or the person’s ability to follow straight lines in paragraphs.

“Using image recognition programmes, it is possible to compare the writing with the model that I talked about before,” the researcher explained. “When a parent teaches their child to write, it is highly likely that we will find similarities between the two scripts. But a person’s handwriting is also influenced by the time they spent in school or by the style of a particular teacher.”

The Brain During Writing

Neuroscientist Marieke Longcamp, from the University of Aix-Marseille in France, studies how we learn how to write.

To do this, she uses magnetic resonance imaging machines, which allow a person’s brain to be viewed in real time as they perform certain activities.

In one of the studies, they gave the volunteers tablets (writing material) that could record their writing movements while they examined them.

Ms Longcamp reported that it is possible to observe the activation of different parts of the brain, which work together to make the complex act of writing possible.

“Regions like the premotor cortex, primary motor cortex and parietal cortex are involved in the planning and control of hand gestures,” she tells CrowdScience. “Structures that are at the base of the brain, like the frontal gyrus, which is involved in certain aspects of language, and the fusiform gyrus, which processes written language, influence writing.”

“Another fundamental structure is the cerebellum, which coordinates movements and corrects our gestures,” Marieke Longcamp added.

The neuroscientist pointed out that writing depends essentially on two senses: vision and proprioception.

“Proprioception takes into account information from the muscles, the skin and the whole body. All of this is encoded when we write,” she explained.

Experts point out that handwriting is one of the most advanced skills that human beings develop.

How Does Writing Influence Learning?

In this context, it is curious to see how the development of technology can influence the way we understand information.

For many centuries, good old-fashioned writing was the only way to take notes, study, memorise and learn different things.

But this has changed radically in recent years with the arrival of computers, tablets and smartphones.

Today, many young people are learning to write with keys and screens, instead of pencil, pen and paper.

Does this transition have any impact on learning?

Professor of psychology and neuroscience Karin Harman James, from Indiana University in the United States, seeks to answer this question.

She studies how our hands, and the way we hold and manipulate objects, influence brain development and the way we learn.

According to this specialist, there is a difference in terms of brain function between looking at a letter or words and using the body’s motor systems to interact with these pieces of written information.

“I wanted to understand how the interaction of objects with our hands enables us to activate the brain’s motor systems,” she explained to CrowdScience.

In one study, Ms James recruited four-year-olds who did not know how to write.

In the laboratory, they taught these young volunteers one of three things: how to complete strokes to form a letter, how to type a letter and how to write a letter.

When they completed the first part of the activity, they did MRI scans on them.

“We showed the children different letters while we were scanning their brains. At one point, all they needed to do was to look at the letters they had learned to make in the laboratory,” the neuroscientist described.

“We observed that the children who had learned the letters by hand showed brain activation in the areas that are linked to these skills. This was not the case for the other two groups, who completed the strokes or typed them,” she compared.

But the relationship between writing and learning does not stop there.

Children who learn to write – instead of typing – show that they activate more areas of the brain.

Ms James also assessed students.

Their task was to attend a lecture on a subject they knew nothing about. They then filled out a questionnaire on how well they had taken note of what the teacher had taught them.

The next day, all the volunteers took a test based on the content they had been taught.

“We compared the results of students who had taken notes by hand, and with computer or on tablet,” she explained.

The neuroscientist explained that it is common practice in American universities for lecturers to share slides with students.

And some of them have gotten into the habit of opening this file on tablets and taking notes by hand, using digital pens, on the slides themselves.

“In our work, the students who used the tablet to write on the screen got better results on the tests,” the professor of psychology and neuroscience explained.

“We can explain this by the fact that the students not only had the original material, in the slides, but they could also write their own notes by hand.

But writing with pen and paper also proved beneficial. The volunteers who used this method got better results than the people who typed their notes on computer,” Karin Harman James added.

In other words, according to the latest available data, if you really want to learn something, the best thing to do is to write by hand, whether on paper or tablet.

One recent study shows that it is easier to learn by writing by hand than by typing on a computer.

Can You Improve Your Writing?

But all this debate brings us back to the discussion at the beginning of the article: Can people who write improve their writing so that a person can read it to understand and learn?

As part of the CrowdScience programme, Cherrell Avery, a handwriting trainer in London (UK), gave some advice that could prove useful.

Her first piece of advice is to ‘go slowly’. We write too fast and we do not pay attention to the shape of letters and words.

Ms Avery also added that there is a need to understand each person’s style, including the best writing utensil, how to hold the pen/pencil, the right posture and the type of paper, among other factors.

In her opinion, it is possible to improve your handwriting through exercise.

“Of course, one single training session will not be enough to make significant changes,” she said.

But with a little persistence, it is possible to create a “muscle memory” that encourages a new writing style.

“At first, it is a conscious effort. But little by little, it will become a habit and you will not even think about this new way of writing,” Cherrell Avery said.

Finally, Ms Avery said writing is important to us, always because it represents an ‘extension of our personality’. “It is as if we are leaving a bit of ourselves on the page”.