Handwriters

In my language course, I assign short stories by excellent writers as homework and then we use the stories to work on grammar/ vocabulary. The stories are 1-3 pages long and are written by Cela, Pardo Bazán, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Paz Soldán, Díaz Valcárcel, Eduardo Berti, etc.

And here’s what I noticed. Students very often copy the stories by hand as a way of working on them. They intuitively understand that this will help process the text. It’s truly brilliant. I see them time and again in class push away the printout of the story and use their own handwritten copy. Almost no one chooses to work with the text off a screen.

I’m very glad. The materiality of the written word is a huge part of its magic, and it’s excellent that the very young understand it.