My eight year-old came home recently with a request. She needed an ink pen which she would start to use in October in her literacy classes. An ink pen. Only after pushing her on what she thought was meant did we arrive at the idea that  the teacher wanted her to have a fountain pen. I was pleasantly surprised. In a world dominated by the keyboard, Emily was to experience the craft of writing through flowing ink. She’ll have to master that flow, inscribing her thoughts in ways that will force her to develop her own individual style. That style will remain with her in a way that is denied in the ascquisition of ‘typing skills’ where the only individual variable (although fascinating for other reasons, font selection is only a choice amoung pre-selected standards) is speed.

Instead, she’ll struggle and eventually gain a fluency which will be her fluency. Allied to an idiolect (her idiosyncratic way of speaking) she’ll also have an … ‘idioscript’ through which she will express herself in writing. Whilst this might be a romantic throw-back, there is also evidence that connects the physical inscription of ink to paperwith developing the brain in unique and important ways.

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information. (WSJ Oct. 5 2010)

So, Emily’s physical and cognitive development continues with fountain pen in hand. The question is: how long will she keep using it? Will it become, like so many of those activities which we begin at school only to subsequently give up, obsolete as she manipulates the next generation of digital inputing devices? And if so, what will her brain lose in the process?