In a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Hannah Pittard (University of Kentucky) describes how requiring students in her first-year English class to write by hand has helped them to think and focus more deeply. While she worried that her technology policy would sound like “someone’s difficult aunt,” Pittard found that requiring students to handwrite all their assignments forced them to not “outrun [their] own thoughts” thoughts and provided evidence of their efforts even when they chose to cross out text. She writes that many students expressed their appreciation for the in-class assignments and felt that they became better writers. “The surprise, for me, wasn’t that the handwriting worked. It was how quickly it worked,” writes Pittard.
