Does handwriting still matter?
I don’t write by hand nearly as much as I used to. Looking back over the past few weeks, I’ve signed my name, written in a couple of birthday cards, and jotted down quick notes before a talk—that’s about it.
Our students also write by hand far less than they once did. Does this matter? For years, we’ve told students handwriting is important because exams are handwritten. But that’s changing. As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (11 November 2025), Year 12 students sitting the International Baccalaureate will soon have the option to complete exams online, with plans for the HSC to go digital between 2026 and 2029
It got me thinking about other life skills that are being gradually lost to technology and social change. For example:
- - Map reading and navigation
- - Sewing and knitting
- - Cooking from scratch
- - Research and source evaluation
- - Memorising (how many phone numbers can you recall or poems?)
- - Driving a manual car
Where could this lead? In the movie Wall-E, there’s a scene showing a future where humans float on chairs, glued to screens, obese and disconnected. Leisure has replaced work, and so many skills have been lost to automation that there’s little left for people to do. I hope we never reach that point.
Last week, I asked staff to nominate senior students (Years 10 and 11) with particularly illegible handwriting. I plan to work with them to improve this skill. For now, most internal and external exams still require handwriting—but the writing is on the wall (pun intended): handwriting may soon join street directories and manual cars in the museum of forgotten skills.
So, what do we lose—and what do we gain? Children today learn to type or swipe long before they learn to write. Yet research is clear: both handwriting and keyboarding should remain essential tools for learning from an early age.
As Askvik et al. (2020) note:
“The pen causes different underlying neurological processes that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning and remembering.”
Handwriting skills underpin success in reading and writing. A lack of fluency can weaken the foundation for literacy tasks (Ray, Dally & Lane, 2022).
Recent evidence reinforces this. A study of 544 Year 2 students across 17 Perth primary schools compared story writing by hand versus keyboard. Students produced longer and higher-quality handwritten texts, assessed on 10 criteria including ideas, vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation. These findings align with a 2023 meta-analysis of 22 international studies (6,168 participants), which showed that primary students consistently write better-quality texts by hand than by keyboard.
As digital technology makes it easier to communicate without writing—or even typing—it’s critical that we continue to value handwriting. It’s not just about exams; it’s about developing and expressing our thoughts, ideas, and identities, and supporting success in reading, writing, and spelling.
As the Oxford Handwriting NSW report (2025) states:
“The skill of handwriting is not lost—in fact, it’s fundamental to learning.”
