Aha Moment Monday
How is your penmanship?
Is it clear, structured and consistent or is it creative, loopy and …well, people say that you should have been a doctor?
I’m w-a-y faster, clearer and more accurate with a keyboard than with a pen. Even I have trouble reading my writing sometimes.
Now the flat screen is a whole other ball game.
I watch people zip through messages with two thumbs blazing and I’m wowed with their accuracy.
(I think I spend as much time correcting my prose than writing it in the first place.)
Handwriting analysts can tell a lot about an individual’s character by their handwriting.
Perhaps analyzing is as much of a lost art as cursive itself because when we keyboard, all of our writing looks the same.
Sure we can choose our font, emojies and how many exclamation marks we add to make a point but essentially, electronic communication has imposed structure…. like the lines in a colouring book
By losing our interest in cursive, are we inhibiting our creativity?
In a study by Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington, she reveals children in grades two, four and six wrote more words faster and expressed more ideas when writing their essays by hand as opposed to with a keyboard.
Aha – we’re most in touch with our creative centre with pen in hand
Writing causes thinking.
In an article in Psychology today, Dr. William R. Klemm writes, “…In the case of learning cursive writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation, movement control and thinking. Cursive writing trains the brain to integrate visual and tactile information and fine motor dexterity.”
When you write, you actually have to pay attention and think and areas of the brain are activated that are not so during typing.
And it turns out, the more meaningful the context, the more activation there is in both hemispheres of the brain.
The keyboard is perfect for transcribing, documenting and sharing what we already know.
But when you want to max your pure potential, your favourite writing instrument is your creativity’s best friend.
Write on!
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