I must admit that I
do not find myself in agreement with some of Coyne’s specific claims about why
writing cursively is different than composing at a keyboard. For instance, he
describes typing as ‘file retrieval’, because you have to remember where a
particular letter is on the keyboard. In contrast, “With handwriting, you create the letters anew each time, using much more
complex motor skills. Whether it’s the flowing motion of the arm, or the feel
of the page under your hand, or the aesthetic satisfaction of a well-turned ‘f’,
it seems to engage the more intuitive, right-brain aspects of cognition.” As a
cognitive scientist, I am reluctant to appeal to intuition or to right-brain
processing.
As an embodied
cognitive scientist, though, I am in complete agreement with Coyne’s view that
how we write affects what we write. The extended mind hypothesis makes the
claim that the external world is a fundamental component of our mentality;
change that world and you change the mind. Coyne provide some wonderful examples
of how his own writing processes are affected by constraints imposed by
external media, and I see these as compelling examples of the extended mind
hypothesis in action. For instance, Coyne takes advantage of the extended mind
to deal with writer’s block: “Often when I am stuck at the keyboard, unable to
find my way out of whatever mental cul-de-sac I have put myself in, I will pick
up a pen and start writing — and the words start to come again.”
My own experience
with the physical act of writing complements Coyne’s. In my final year of high
school, I took a typing class as an option, and have long since thought that it
was the most important part of my high school education. But as an
undergraduate student, and as a graduate student, typing was never my first
line of attack. Instead, I would take lecture notes by hand, and would later study
for exams by typing my notes up. The first draft of any paper that I wrote was
created in longhand. I would then edit that handwritten manuscript, and only
when I was happy with it would I type the final version. It wasn’t until my
last year as a PhD student that I learned to compose at the keyboard because of
the newfound pressure of ‘publish or perish’. Cursive drafts simply took too
long to produce.
I am now quite expert
in composing manuscripts at the keyboard; most of my current writing is done on
a laptop, sitting in a reclining chair in my living room with my dog sleeping
on my legs. When I encounter writer’s block, I -- like Coyne -- deal with it by
changing the medium. But I don’t go back to longhand. Instead, I’m more likely
to activate my speech recognition software and dictate to my computer. (I used
this software to compose this very post.)This approach does make me think about
writing in a different way, but one more important thing that I’ve noticed is
that it changes my writing style. Coyne’s column makes me wonder what would
happen to my writing style if I went back to my old ways and pulled out pencil
and paper.
Coyne’s column also
makes me wonder about the research that has been conducted on the effects of
writing medium on writing ability. In a recent post, I suggested that the
embodied experimental psychologists involved with the Canadian Society for
Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science were missing the key implications of the
extended mind hypothesis. Does removing cursive writing from the school
curriculum impact the thought processes involved in converting our thoughts
into text? I think that I’m going to explore the existing literature on this
issue; this seems exactly like the sort of applied problem that is crying out
for extensive contributions from embodied cognitive science.