University professors are appreciating a change in their students' handwriting. "Each year that passes is worse, there are more students with bad handwriting", observes Anna Bartra, professor of Catalan Philology at the UAB. This is not a new comment. "You are often forced to accept unintelligible sentences as good, after spending some time trying to figure out what they are saying," confirms Juan Pablo Sanz, a professor at the Abat Oliba CEU University. "But it is also true that good calligraphy has not completely disappeared."
Lack of practice can lead to letter deformation. For a few years, it has basically been learned and practiced at school. Even in high school, assignments are written on the computer. The time that was previously dedicated to writing by hand gradually decreased from adolescence to the detriment of the cognitive benefits of this practice, but in favor of other gains.
"The habit of writing, which is acquired as a child, is never lost", reassures Ignacio Morgado, Professor of Psychobiology at the UAB Neuroscience Institute. It's like a bicycle, no matter how much you stop using it, you can ride it again. Another thing is the dexterity or discomfort of the seat. "Look, I've got a tough one", protested a university student to his teacher not long ago after an hour and a half exam.
"Like any habit, if you don't practice it, you lose the speed and fluidity of the stroke", continues Morgado, which can lead to a deformation of the letter. "But what adult now writes long texts by hand?", he asks. Effectively, the relationship of citizens with the administration or with companies is established through technological platforms. Friends are congratulated on the holidays via mobile phone. The pencil is taken for the shopping list, if one is not fond of writing diaries.
"With the pandemic, digitization accelerated not only in universities, but also in institutes and this process, unfortunately, has not slowed down", explains the neuropsychologist Marina Fernández Andú-jar, professor at the UAO-CEU, for whom cognitive faculties will be lost and the will and effort will cease to be trained. "Writing costs more than typing," he adds.
To a large extent, the computer is already the usual means of communication in many faculties, although after the emergence of artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT there is a return to handwritten exams. "At the UPC we ask for reports and reports by hand to avoid copying and pasting from the computer," says Josep Pegueroles, researcher at the Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB) at the UPC. It is very favorable that they take notes by hand because the effort involved in writing requires a lot of mental work that is not done if you only listen. "Besides, they don't answer the cell phone that way."
On Tuesday, a quick look at the tables in the Jaume Fuster library in Plaça Lesseps, crowded with students, shows that we no longer live in a world of exclusively manual writing, but not digital either. Notebooks and papers coexist at the same time, although among the latter few are handwritten. Paradoxically, students of scientific and technological careers write by hand, while those of social sciences and humanities, with a computer.
Anna (22 years old), a law student, is in front of a bound block on which there are sentences underlined with phosphorescent colors. She types in class or takes notes from others and uses material uploaded by teachers. In his opinion, it would be impossible to study all this if it were manuscript.
Ro (23 years old), a student of Social Education at the UB, takes notes by hand and on the computer, indiscriminately. It doesn't happen to them. "I don't need it, I hardly take exams", he justifies. Guillermo's career, a Leinn degree student (University of Mondragón), is also so practical that his learning does not go beyond writing down theory. Write, of course, comments in the agenda. "They are short sentences", he says. Because he values it so much, he looks at it with the handwriting to the point that he thinks that, now, his former teachers would praise his handwriting.
The quality of the handwriting, explained the teachers consulted, can be guessed by the gender of the author and in this comparison women clearly win: better calligraphy, better presentation, better structuring of ideas. It would seem that the lyrics and the performance also go together. "Even though I've seen beautiful calligraphy with spectacular fictional narrative," laughs Sanz when he remembers it.
Carlos (18), future industrial engineer at UPC, and Claudia (23), Statistics student (UB/UPC) take notes by hand. They do it, they explain, because of the difficulty of computers to incorporate mathematical symbols. Also the Chemistry student, Rachele (20), who like the rest is in the library, takes notes by hand, only she does it with an electronic board connected to her laptop. Everything is automatically transcribed into a document.
Other students explain that they take notes cooperatively. This is the case of Alba (21), Journalism and ADE student at the UB. “Since I've been in college, I've never used a piece of paper. I was already writing on a computer in high school," he says. Now she records the classroom explanations in a joint Drive document with two friends. Class time is shared between all three. "Thus, two hours become shorter". He values the time he "doesn't waste". And he doesn't notice that his handwriting has changed.
The technology is also given other uses such as the recording of the teacher's voice (which is not allowed on many campuses) which an application immediately transcribes into a computer document that the student polishes, removing useless recorded words , during class. Whoever applies this recognizes that afterwards, before the exam, he has to study a little more than when he did it by hand and passed it cleanly, because in this process "he had more left". But, like Alba, he values saving time and effort in the whole process.
"Notes are useful for reading, thinking, studying", enumerates Enric Prats, vice dean of the Faculty of Education at the UB. "The computer goes faster, but it simplifies useful processes."
"It's hard for me to understand how they take notes on the computer because they can't make outlines, include asterisks to highlight, join paragraphs with arrows..." reflects UAB History professor Ignasi Fernández Terricabra, who warns that in universities in other countries they only use laptops. "I'm not against technology, but if you have everything at hand (mails, news, websites...) it's easy to get distracted and lose focus."
"If I want them to retain an essential concept, I tell them: I need you to pay attention to me in the next 10 minutes. Leave mobile phones and lower the lids of laptops", explains the professor from the UAO-CEU.
Fernández Terricabra also relates the use of the computer to the difficulty of reading long texts. This is a regret shared by all the teachers consulted. Little is read. Adapted books are suggested, footnotes are removed so they are not rejected. The suggested bibliographies are barely followed. "If you ask for a sentence that captures the essence of a text, they don't write it, they copy a fragment."
"Now we make everything easier for them", considers Barta, who is more worried about the loss of quality of the calligraphy than the spelling mistakes, the impoverished vocabulary, the good presentation of a job and the little habit of to read. "We upload graphics, maps, photos, notes, maybe we facilitate too much".
Daniel Cassany, professor attached to the UPF, does not mourn the calligraphic retreat. He believes that it was never valued aesthetically as in Asian countries and that many current students know typography from other languages. He believes that times have changed and that it is more important to know how to spot fake news or distinguish a reliable source. "Before, calligraphy was important because it was part of your presentation, now you build your identity in a different way," he adds. According to Cassany, writing is "re-accommodating" to the various existing learning registers (podcasts, videos, etc.) that young people value.
Morgado also sees the technology that all older adults have become accustomed to as a sign of the times. He believes that, in any case, a dependency is generated (you always have to carry a device and find energy).
"Nothing will happen to the brain". concludes And he gives a recommendation to young people: reserve the handwritten text for the emotional. "Give writing in your handwriting to your loved ones," he tells them.
