24 November 2017

Salzburger Nachrichten: On the significance of handwriting

The Salzburger Nachrichten newspaper conducted an interview on the significance of handwriting with Institute Director Dr. Marianela Diaz Meyer and Executive Director Karin Krieg at the Interpädagogica trade fair. The experts’ most important findings:

Better and more sustainable text permeation: “When writing by hand, the writer has to think in advance about what they want to write. They have to summarise the content as they write it and record it in larger units.”

There is a close connection with personality development: “Handwriting involves learning an entire process that, in addition to learning characters and symbols, also teaches the ability to express oneself and to be aware of oneself.”

The style of the handwriting is secondary: “What matters is that children learn to write fluidly and legibly.”

Even in everyday life at the office, handwriting is still important: “Software developers think with their hands and initially plan a sketch of what they are trying to achieve in the next programming step.”

Handwriting is considered to be authentic and trustworthy: “Using copy and paste to write a dissertation is not possible with handwriting.”

Handwriting has its advantages when studying (available through SN PLUS)