The Handwriting on the Wall

Immune to my insistence that my poor penmanship would never matter, Mrs. Mitchell, my third grade teacher, used to make me spend my afternoons in her classroom where I was required to raise my level of legibility. When the world went digital and writing shifted to keyboards and touchscreens, I felt I had the last laugh. But is there a chance that handwriting — the act, if not the quality — actually does matter? As Maria Konnikova writes in the NYT: “New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.”