When I began researching handwriting, the concern was digital technology. We were typing more, writing less, and increasingly moving everyday thinking onto screens.
Today, that conversation has changed.
We are no longer simply choosing between a pen and a keyboard. Generative AI can now suggest the idea, write the sentence, produce the image and offer multiple variations before we have fully decided what we think.
So perhaps the more interesting question is no longer whether handwriting is better than digital technology.
It is:
What happens to our thinking when we remove more and more of the making?
My earlier research explored the connection between writing, drawing, movement and thought. Sketchnoting eventually became particularly important because it required me to select information, translate it, organise it spatially and decide what mattered.
Recent research continues to suggest that handwriting and typing are not cognitively identical activities.
But I am less interested in turning that finding into a competition between pen and keyboard.
The value may lie in something broader.
Writing by hand introduces resistance. It is slower. We cannot instantly rearrange every sentence. We cannot produce twenty alternatives at once. We have to decide what to put down.
That small delay creates space for selection and interpretation.
AI, by contrast, is extraordinarily good at reducing the distance between intention and outcome. That can be incredibly useful. But speed can also remove stages of a process that once required us to struggle, interpret, question and invent.
This does not mean that AI cannot be part of meaningful creative practice.
The question is how actively we remain involved.
Perhaps that is what the hand still offers us.
- Not nostalgia.
- Not proof that analogue tools are inherently superior.
- But a form of active participation.
How much of the space between an idea and an outcome do we still want to occupy ourselves?