June 29, 2004
Is txting killing handwriting?
Next year, students taking their SATs will have a new task to perform -- a 25-minute longhand essay. And this is apparently panicking teenagers across America. Why? Are they worried that their nanoscale attention spans are not longer up to the task?
Nope. They're worried they no longer are able to write by hand. Growing up in the digital age means you write solely by keyboard, or by 12-button mobile phone keypad. As one student told the Seattle Post Intelligencer:
"People like myself, who don't have good handwriting, are wondering if some anonymous person is going to think I spelled stuff wrong and not understand what I'm trying to say," said Lucas Rohm, a 16-year-old Country Day alum who is now a rising junior at Greenwich High School. "I definitely feel handwriting is something I need. Country Day just kind of brushed that out."
I can sympathise. I'm a journalist, and I crank out quite a lot of text each month, but since I spend the majority of my time at my keyboard, my muscle memory for handwriting is simply shot. I take notes pretty frequently on notepads, but I almost never write entire stories by longhand. But every once in a while I'll have to work with pen-and-paper -- as, for example, when I'm on the road and can't use my laptop, but am on a deadline and need to start sketching out an article while on a bus. And as I work away, I wonder: Is there any difference between our cognitive styles when we write longhand, versus typing on a keyboard?
Since I type about 70 words per minute, I can type practically as fast as I can compose sentences in my head. So does the much-slower pace of handwriting actually create a different way not just of writing, but of thinking? Does the buffer buildup between my brain and my arm affect things?
What I mean is this: When I'm typing, because I can generate text so fast, I'll toss lots of stuff out on the page -- and then quickly edit or change it. But when I'm writing by hand, because it's so much slower I'll try to compose the sentence in my head before trying to write it. With a keyboard, I sort of offload some of my mental-sorting onto the page, where I can look at the words I've written, meditate on them, and manipulate them. With writing, that manipulation happens before the output. Clearly this would lead to some cognitive difference between the two modes ... but I can't quite figure out what it would be.
Along these lines, it's worth pointing out that a 23-year-old student in Singapore seems to have set a new world record for speed-typing on a phone keypad. As the Globe and Mail reports:
Student Kimberly Yeo, 23, managed to type a fiendishly complicated 26-word message on her phone in 43.66 seconds, organizer Singapore Telecommunications said in a statement Monday.
Her effort in heats held at the weekend could beat by a wide margin the existing text message record of 67 seconds, set last year by Briton James Trusler in Sydney, Australia, it said. [snip]
Contestants had to type: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."
(Thanks to Techdirt Wireless for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at June 29, 2004 01:23 PM
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YES!!! ...is the answer to your question (below):
>
So does the much-slower pace of handwriting actually create a different way not just of writing, but of thinking? Does the buffer buildup between my brain and my arm affect things?
>
As an opposite example, I occasionally use Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate directly into the computer, and my "writing" style becomes totally different than a typed document.
In this case, your mouth works MUCH faster than your brain, and MUCH MUCH faster than your fingers. The dictation is quite easy with these programs (IBM ViaVoice also) but the composition is quite hard!
:-)
this is fascinating. the structure and rhythms and even the look of language are changing because of technology.
Yes, it's really fascinating! And yes, Chris, I tried Dragon systems a couple of years ago, and noticed the same thing. Composing sentences by speaking them is a whole other cognitive ball of wax.
Just about the only time I write with a pen any more is to sign checks. The rest is all computer keyboard, Palm OS Graffiti, and Clie and Treo thumb keyboard.
I was curious whether T9 predictive text input was allowed in the competition... Certain delays are inherent when using alpha-input, such as hitting the number 2 three times to select the letter 'c'. Now in typing 'Cheese' I must press 2,2,2,4,4,3,3, then pause a moment to advance the cursor, then 3,3,7,7,7,7,3,3. That's 15 keystrokes and an obligatory 1 second pause in the middle. On the other hand, with T9 input I can press 2,4,3,3,7,3 and it automatically determines that I must mean 'cheese' because that's the only word in its dictionary that can be reached with that sequence of numbers.
In the whole typing test, which is curiously exactly 160 characters, only 'piranhas', 'Serrasalmus' and 'Pygocentrus' are absent from the T9 dictionary. They may be manually entered, but assuming they aren't then that's 17+28+25=70 keystrokes for those 3 words and a remaining 130 keystrokes for the rest of the message. Over half the message is contained within those 3 words.
No point, just idle observation. This test is rather subjective to the layout of the handset used, the capacity of its text-entry features, T9 or otherwise among other things. I wonder what's really being proven... the increasing aptitude of a person to enter text on a phone, or the improvement of text-entry and ergonomics on those phones?
With my PDA I find it much easier to take part in a discussion while making notes in Graffiti-style "handwriting" even though using the keyboard is faster -- typing on the tiny keyboard noticeably takes up more of the available brain power when you need to multitask.
This seems to be an effect of the tiny keyboard as I am pretty slick with a full-size one.
[And, yes, the competition described did involve typing without predictive text assistance.]
Ah, interesting. After Carl did that neat analysis of the multi-tap aspects of those words, I was wondering.
I don't really think your thoughts are right. Maybe you need a loan?
Before that stupid person made that post, this was a serious conversation about the text message language. I actually wrote part of my dissertation on this point. The title is
is texting making us all illiterate?.
Ive posted this here
thanks
Interesting. I never thought of that before. And I think it also affects the way we memorize. For example, when I'm trying to get a poem stuck in my head, I write it down on paper, not on my cellphone. I find it more difficult to memorize if it's on the latter medium.
