Writing Makes You Smarter

One of the biggest fears that I have is that someday very soon, writing will be irrelevant. I mean, there are schools that don’t allow kids to actually write out their notes; they actually HAVE to have an iPad or a laptop. In this upper-class mall I used to work at, the kids were REQUIRED to purchase an iPad for their schooling – no ands, ifs or buts. Writing was what made me pay attention in school so much. There were no distractions; it was just you, your classmates, your teacher, your pen and paper. Mind you, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t doodle while I was in class, but it was still using my pen and paper, so there.

Emailing and using various social networks has taken over the snail mail world. Hardly anyone except people like my friends and I, bother to use the post office anymore. Writing is becoming a lost art… and cursive writing even more so. People just don’t appreciate the value of a pen or a pencil anymore. Why write things down on paper when you can just use the computer?

I’ll give you one good reason: the computer makes you less intelligent.

Seriously.

Writing the good ol’ fashioned way gets your brain working more by triggering responses with the parts of your brain that work with visuals (because you’re seeing what’s on your paper), motor (because you’re physically writing out the letters you need to create words) and cognitive (since you need to remember what each letter looks like and how to form it with your pen and paper).

I have a buttload of notebooks lying around everywhere and I use them constantly. Nothing quite allows me to get all of my thoughts out quite like a pen and some paper. I mean, you can USE a sticky notes application, but it’s not quite the same as having physical little sticky notes everywhere around you reminding you of what you need to do. Plus, I’m a big doodler, as previously mentioned. I like to come up with stories and I like to draw out little pictures to coincide with my work. You can’t do that with a computer.

Sure, you could doodle with a tablet, but to be writing and/or brainstorming and then to dig out a tablet so you can also doodle, well, it’s not as convenient as the margins on a piece of paper.

Now there’s a lot more to it than just writing makes you smarter, but quite frankly, the details are a little over my head, even though I did, in fact, grow up learning how to write in school. If you want to know more technicalities about this study, check out the original article below by the Huffington Post.


SOURCE: Huffington Post