Today, Explained - The lost art of handwriting

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

How our relationship with writing has changed, and how that’s changed us. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Avishay Artsy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. A third grader practices his cursive handwriting at P.S.166 in Queens, N.Y. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer. If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail]. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Handwritten note is super important, and yet I feel like that's something being lost. It's useless. Pursive is outdated. My wife's not so much in agreement on that. I take a lot of pride in my.

handwriting actually. I joke that I was a calligrapher in a past life. My parents started dating back in the 80s and for a while they were long distance. This was way before the smartphone, so they sent each other a ton of mail. They wrote letters back and forth and my dad would make my mom mixtapes to send her. I love it because it's a peek into my parents' lives before me. I can feel the paper.

I can see my mom's beautiful pinmanship. But it also makes me realize we really don't physically write all that much anymore. But some of you are trying to bring it back. Handwriting is a big part of my life. I've been bullet journaling since eighth grade, and now I just graduated college. I love writing by notes. I keep a shopping list that my partner likes to make fun of and consistently tries to make digital. My husband loves to joke that I write.

enough letters to keep the post office in business. I'm John Gulen Hill, and this week on Explain It to Me from Vox, the handwritten word, how our relationship with writing has changed and how that's changed us. First up, learning how to write. I called up Sean Dachick. I'm a professor of special education at the University of Iowa. I'm also a former K-12 teacher, administrator, and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. Okay, Sean, it may be a surprise to no one, but it has been a while since I was in elementary school, and things have changed a lot since then. When do students start to learn handwriting in schools, and how is it being taught now?

The vast majority of states, approximately 48, have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten and extends a little bit past the first grade. Now, importantly, the standards only focus on print handwriting. So text, that's unconnected. There's a huge range of time spent on handwriting. But on average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms. 10 minutes does not seem like a lot of time. Looking back, it felt like so much more.

When did handwriting become less of priority? Yeah, so changes really started to happen around 2010, and that was when the passage of the national academic standards that's typically called the Common Core Academic Standards were adopted across the United States. It is one of the most confusing, controversial issues in the entire nation, and it's percolating at the grassroots level, making its way onto the national stage. It's the Common Core. The Common Core raises the bar for students' performance. we have to challenge our students in ways that have them interact more actively in learning. And in those standards, there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and to start to adopt keyboarding or typing. So the standards explicitly talk about that students should make this transition to keyboarding right after the first and second grade.

Wow, that's so early. Right, yeah. And then in those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding and it completely dropped out cursive handwriting. Wow. You know, okay, I think of my own education. It was print, cursive, and then eventually you get to your Mavis Beacon typing lessons. Welcome to typing class. I'm your teacher of Mavis Beacon. Click the computer in the center of your screen to start your lesson. And I remember I remember being so excited for third grade in particular because where I went to school, that was when they started teaching cursive. And it was like, oh my gosh, cursive. But is it just not being taught at all anymore in K-12 schools? So over the past several years, there's been a swing

back towards cursive. So the latest count is approximately 26 states across the United States have passed some sort of legislation, reinserting cursive into their statewide curriculum. Florida students will soon be learning cursive again. Learning cursive handwriting will now be mandatory in California schools. Pennsylvania students haven't been required to learn cursive since around 2010. But today, the writing is on the wall and it is the law. So there is some compelling evidence that handwriting, whether it's printer cursive, is closely related to reading development. So following the COVID-19 pandemic across the nation, we saw dips in reading scores. So there some thought by educational stakeholders and legislatures that perhaps if we focus in on handwriting or in

this case cursive, maybe that will improve student reading scores. And I also hear consistently from parents, guardians, teachers, they're very interested in minimizing screen time. And then there's also, there's a camp of people out there who may have a strong patriotic inclination. And they say that, well, the Declaration of Independence is written in cursive, so we should teach kids cursive because it looks so different than print, so that way they can study the founding documents. You've worked in education for a very long time, and I'm curious what you make of the changing trends in handwriting. Is pin and paper actually better compared to screens? That's a complicated question. But for younger kids who are learning how to read, there does seem to be

some benefit on specifically using pencil and paper. There is such a close connection between reading and writing. When students learn how to handwrite, they are basically committing to memory not only the shape of what a letter looks like, but also its name. So let's say you're teaching a student, this is a letter M. And then they learn and commit to memory, oh, these are the different strokes or loops of M. And that also makes the mm sound. So they're committing that to memory. And And so that allows them to draw on that for when they're reading. Now, for older high school students, there also seems to be some logic in how distracting screens can be.

So, I mean, I've taught high school before. I also currently teach undergraduate students. And there's a lot of different things that pop up on screens, whether it's online shopping or checking messages or checking emails that can definitely distract from learning important content. Now, let me kind of flip over the other side. Screens are definitely here to stay. And I think pencils and paper are also here to stay. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. That also adds in a whole other layer of complexity to this. So for instructors and parents and guardians, perhaps the better question to ask is not so much which is better, but it's how much time

do my kids need with each one of these ways to communicate, whether it's with a paper and pencil or whether it's with a computer or tablet or smartphone. You know, we talked a little bit about this evolution of technology. You have pin in paper, you have computers, you have smartphones, now we have AI. Is AI another reason to keep handwriting alive? You know, unfortunately, I think so. So computer-based writing and with the rise of artificial intelligence, I think it brings up difficult to determine questions on authorship. I definitely see kind of a shift back almost to the blue books. After being a fixture on campuses for generations, the blue book is making a comeback to

combat cheating in the AI era. Get this, they're making students pull out their pens and pencils once again and just write on paper by hand. I know that the Iowa bookstore here has started stocking blue books on their shelves for the first time since I've been here. I've been here over a decade. So it is surprising. What do you think students lose if they stop writing by hand regularly? I do think that one of the strongest reasons that I can think of to engage in handwriting is actually probably what we consider a moral reason or lesson, is that handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us. And I think that's one of the reasons why a handwritten note resonates so emotionally with us as humans. You know, so like for instance, when my mom had a recent birthday, I sent her a handwritten card on Mother's Day.

My sons and I wrote little notes and my four-year-old drew a picture for my wife. And then I've been by mid-40s, so probably one of the rites of passage and being kind of a middle-aged person now is we were. My wife and I went through the process of getting a living will put together. Oh, yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Gotta have all your ducks in a row. And then last night I was making handwritten notes on the living world because I knew that was something that I really needed to think through carefully and deliberately. And at least for me and what we kind of see with even lots of college-age students is that when you engage in writing with a pen or pencil, you tend to.

synthesize or think more deeply about that information than when you're just typing. So we take in information better when we write it down. What else does writing do for us? That's next. Support for the show comes from Quince. In the summer, everything changes. Longer days, summer Fridays, and a serious wardrobe change. You still want pieces that look good, but are also made from lighter fabrics that feel effortless. That's where Quince comes in. They've evoked on high-quality essentials, but without the luxury markup. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with

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I'm JQ. Back with Moore, Explain It to me. Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she researches technology and human behavior. And one human behavior that she loves to dig into is writing. One of those things that I think we all take for granted, that's a skill we all have. and I had young children at the time and noticed that they weren't being taught handwriting in school the way I was.

So I thought, well, am I an old timer who's just sort of hearkening back nostalgically to the good old days? Or is there something useful in handwriting? One of the most surprising things I discovered is that learning to write by hand, whether that's printing block letters or later cursive handwriting, doesn't just teach you how to put words on paper. It implicates all kinds of things about short-term and long-term memory, it affects our ability to analyze text. If you haven't learned how to write well by hand,

you approach words differently. You understand and remember them differently. So there's all kinds of broader implications for how we remember the things we read that are based in some of that embodied cognition. So that was really fascinating to me. The other thing I found is that it just makes us slow down. If you're thinking and writing,

your body doesn't allow you to write as quickly as you can type on a keyboard. So that also changes the process of how we put words to pay. paper. I will say we heard from a lot of listeners on this topic, and we heard from a lot of listeners who still prefer to write things out. I do. You typically write a card, a letter, a few postcards. I write those at least two or three times a week. My friends and I, after we graduated from college, got into the habit of mailing each other monthly letters. My wife likes love letters, and so I write her

one once a week. But it is true. Typing is faster and more convenient. Why is slowing down a good thing? Why do we need to slow down? Well, I think we all sort of complain sometimes about how the world seems to just be speeding up year after year. And our technologies encourage that sense of with infinite scroll and all the things that we can do with them to make time not be located in place and not be slower. But what it robs us of is downtime. time where we can daydream, let our minds wander. And sitting and thinking and writing your thoughts forces you to really shape those thoughts

in a way that you do differently on the screen. It's actually a necessary and healthy practice in daily life that more and more of us should try to integrate into our lives. In some states, teaching cursive is now being required in public schools again, and there's been a boom in the notebook and pen market. Several years ago, I discovered fountain pens and fountain pen ink and it's just a beautiful, tactile, visual experience.

I love pens. I love stationary. I get compliments on my handwriting all the time. I have found truly nothing is better than pen to paper. We're also seeing a resurgence of physical media coming from younger generations like Gen Z, you know, vinyl, cassettes, CDs. Are people just being sentimental about some of this archaic technology? Or is there something real here? I think the first instinct we all have is to say, oh, nostalgia trip, isn't that cute? It's just a small group of people who are, you know, the guy who always wants to only listen to things on vinyl.

But I think this is somewhat different. I think the search for this, particularly among younger generations, speaks to a desire for tangible things. Things they can hold in their hand. Because if you think about their memories, for example, most of them are in a digital cloud. It might, those might disappear. They're not organized in the way that we used to organize. organize our old-fashioned memories of whether they put in a scrapbook or a photo album, something you could pick up and touch. So I think that it speaks to a deeper impulse for those tangible

objects. I think it's also a desire to reintroduce into their lives something that technology took away. And that's some friction. Because in some sense, technology has made certain things so easy that we miss that that pushback, that response we get from the world when we rub up against something the wrong way and have to figure it out ourselves. So I see it all as a pretty hopeful expression of not wanting to totally deskill ourselves as human beings. And we need friction to learn. We need frustration to understand our own approach to things. And in some small way, handwriting reintroduces that for some people. And I think that's all for the good. Is our handwriting socialize? I don't know. I remember my parents being like,

you need to write needer. We're practicing, making me write sentences, like, you need to have neat handwriting. But is it just something sort of like, sorry, that's the way I write? So it's interesting. I think when we're all younger, we're sort of, it feels very conformist and oppressive to be told everyone's letters should look the same. But that is actually the building block for later being able to be expressive with your writing. Just like anyone who's an accomplished painter will tell you they have to first learn to do the basic forms and the shadowing. So we should think about that with our handwriting. And it's why we should practice. And I think it's great that many schools are bringing back teaching handwriting. But I think it is your parents

were exactly right because they understood that your handwriting is a reflection of who you are in the world and you'll be judged by it. And so that's one of the things where a lot of kids these days when they, the most interesting anecdote I have come across in my research were bakeries, like at supermarkets, having problems hiring people to be bakers because none of the people they hired knew how to write a happy birthday message in cursive to make it look nice on a cake. Wow. So they had to teach them cursive so they could decorate the cake. So yeah, it's great. I think we need the basics, though, in order to then later have a more expressive form of handwriting. Change is normal. Socrates said writing things down would make people lazy and make us stop relying on our memories. People thought the Sony Walkman was going to make us anti-social and isolated. Do we romanticize the past? Do we need to accept that people have moved on? Or, yeah, I wonder how you think balancing that.

Like moving forward with the times, but also kind of cherishing these old ways. This is the great question. And it's each age has to ask it again for itself. So I think, look, I don't want to go back to, you can prime my washing machine out of my cold dead hands. Like, that thing is, that technology is here to say. And I, you know, look, I use digital streaming music. We use our computers every day for work. I wouldn't want to go back.

But I think the challenge now is that we have to actively carve out those analog moments. We have to make the effort and we have to relearn lessons about what we should value in daily life. So I think we should value more face-to-face interaction, more civility in public life, like acknowledging the stranger when they walk into the elevator. And these seem like small niceties, but they really matter in terms of our day-to-day lives and the ability to be civil to each other. So we have to choose it now. It is an option never to do it that way, and that is brand new. So in some ways, I think we do adapt and we have adapted, but we can overcorrect towards technology and start to become a little too machine-like in our own way of behaving

and thinking. And I think sometimes we need to step back and say, what are the human things that we've lost in doing that? You know, if someone's listening to this interview and is thinking, I haven't written anything by hand in weeks, what would you tell them they're missing? They're missing the experience, first of frustration, if you haven't been writing in a while, you'll be shocked that you might not be able to read your own handwriting. A lot of people have that experience.

But you're missing the process of embodied cognition, your mind and your body working together. So I encourage people to just a couple times a day try to do something by hand, write by hand, use your body and your mind together in this way because those experiences are things we have to seek out now. Handwriting is just one of the many experiences we can seek out for that connection. Coming up, what we lose when we swap pins and pencils for phones and tablets. Support for today's explain comes from NPR. If you are curious about the economy and want to know more, you might want to check out Planet Money. It's a podcast from NPR that makes sense of the economy.

Recent episodes include leaked tapes that show how rich people avoid taxes, why Americans take so little vacation and how to make a book into a bestseller. Love it, from the job market to the stock market, to the prices at the supermarket. Planet Money is a different kind of world where the complex economy somehow makes sense, where human stories supersede abstract theories live, laugh, learn, love, be entertained. The host go to unusual lengths to explain the economy. They do indeed. I used to work there. It was exhausting. From publishing their own book to tracking the global supply chain,

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the number of sellers making over $1 million a year has doubled. And people selling on What Not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products, you're building real connections with buyers. Claire White is our colleague here at Vox, and she's tried What Not as their buyer. What Not has been such a fun experience.

They've got great shows, great auctions, and just such a wide variety of pieces and different categories to shop from. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T in the App Store, download, and you can start selling right away. Sarah Hirshander is a fellow for Vox's future perfect team. She's been looking into how all the time we spend swiping and tapping on screens is impact. our sense of touch. I mean, we talk a lot about screen fatigue, but I think we talk a lot less about the fact that we simply use our hands a lot less than we used to. At least most people, I don't want to overgeneralize here. Some people still have very physical jobs. I personally

always find myself kind of like using my computer for almost everything. I navigate with my phone. I use my phone's calculator instead of like actually like touching buttons. I talk to my friends all the time like via text. So I've just been talking to a lot of folks about like, like what does that mean for us? Like, how does that change how we feel about the world around us when we're not touching it as much? And what I've been finding so far is that it does kind of lead to this loss. I want to get into the effects that removing these kind of tactile experiences have had on us. And I want to start with children who are growing up in a world dominated by screens. What's it looking like for them. Yeah, I mean, it seems really significant. I think anybody who has a child in their life has

seen sort of a toddler navigate an iPad with such deafness that's like almost remarkable. And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. But it does seem like a lot of kids, at least kids who are growing up in households that use screens a lot, are sort of developing their motor skills in that way versus, you know, the way that kids used to develop. their motor skills, which is like playing with blocks or like drawing and coloring. And Education Week did a survey of preschool teachers to kind of figure out if this was just something everyone had an inkling about or if it was something that was really happening. And they found that the majority of preschool teachers say that their kids can't hold crayons

like they used to. They can't zip up their jackets. And that makes a lot of sense, right? Because touch is such a huge part of how kids and to some extent adults learn about their world, the thing with kids is that they're still sort of developing those physical connections. It doesn't mean that they're never going to be able to hold a crayon, but they might never have as nice handwriting as their parents did. And then I think for older kids, too, there does seem to be sort of a linkage to between kind of the dawn of the smartphone and falling test scores.

It's hard to say whether that's specifically about touch versus attention. But I do think because there's been so much evidence that, you know, incorporating touch in learning is such a great way to help kids retain skills. It does seem possible that the fact that so much of what we do is now online is affecting how kids, how kids learn. What about adults who didn't grow up with screens? How's this transition from going analog to going digital, going for us? Yeah, I think something that's come up a lot. And I didn't know when I first started reporting this. I was like, are we going to find that our own fingertips are less sensitive than they used to. And what keeps on coming up is that that's not true. Okay. For the most part, I know,

thank goodness. But for the most part, adult motor skills and those sort of pathways are already baked in. And they're actually very resilient. That's something that's been emphasized to me a lot. There is some association between like smartphone addiction and like having worse balance. So there might be some sort of connection there. But it seems to be less important than sort of the emotional and social effects of spending so much time on screen. Have we reached peak screen or are we going to be even more immersed in the digital world as time goes on? I think it's too soon to tell.

However, it does seem like the pendulum might be swinging, that people are starting to catch on, that they're not feeling as good as they might have in the past. And that screens might be playing a role in that. So I do think that there's sort of momentum moving in the opposite direction in a few different ways. One is like very everyday sort of items, like we were talking about like the calculator not being flat. You've seen car companies actually go back to putting buttons in their cars because people miss them. And they're also safer because we are tactile learners. Some car lovers appear to be reversing course on touchscreen technology.

Why would I want to control my mirrors, my seats? You know, all this stuff on a screen. Everything from how you order to how you read, to household appliances, and even cars have been touched by the trend. And then we're also seeing a lot of young people who are kind of returning to analog hobbies, like collecting final records or like joining a crochet club and using their hands in different ways. And I do think part of that is sort of a reaction to this loss of touch.

And then we're also seeing schools kind of doing that too and instituting policies against screen time. I think that's more for those test scores. But that's also going to allow kids presumably to kind of interact with their world in a more tactile way again. We heard from listeners who are actively trying to write by hand more. Do you think people are recognizing what's been lost and are reclaiming those tactile experiences? Like what's going on there? I think so. I think that's exactly what that is.

And I think it's part of that sort of broader movement towards using your hands again. I think people genuinely feel like they don't touch grass anymore. And all of this is sort of trying to touch grass, touch pencils and pens again, like they haven't in a while. And I think there's also just more and more research coming out that, for example, writing by hand helps you learn things in a different way. It helps keep you engaged in a different way than just sort of. steering at your screen will. I mean, maybe one day we'll see screens that, and this is something that's come up in some of my conversations, they're trying to make screens a little bit more tactile potentially in the future. So maybe... Less smooth, more feel. More feel. Like, you used to go to a

mall and, like, buy a shirt and you can, like, feel the texture of the shirt. And, like, of course, brands want to recreate that somehow. We're at this point where one person I spoke to described it as kind of, like, touchscreen mania. And maybe... little by little, we're sort of moving away from that. That's it for this week. We want your help with an upcoming episode about my least favorite part of summer. Mosquitoes. Do they love you? Are you one of the lucky ones that they avoid?

Either way, we want to know how you keep them away and how you deal with those annoying bites. Give us a call at 1-800-61845 or shoot an email to AskVox at Vox.com. Becoming a Vox member will not keep mosquitoes from biting you, but it will let you listen to this and other Vox podcasts ad-free. Head over to Vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. It was edited by Avashi Artsy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch,

and engineered by David Tattashore. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Cullen Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye! Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet?

Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote.

That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills.

You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save.