Our handwriting is born from a large set of factors, from the genetic characteristics that we inherit to the influence of parents and teachers.
Decades of handwritten recipes in the office created a fame that became popular expression: Physician lyrics.
The bottles of many health professionals are so indecipherable that they even motivated Creation of Laws in several states of Brazil To require typed recipes on the computer – or at least in a readable and abbreviated handwriting.
But what explains the format of our letter? And why do some people have such perfect handwriting, while others seem to be unable to write in a minimally readable way to others?
Anthropologist Monika Sani, professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the National Institute for Health and Welfare of the Family of India, recalls that writing by hand requires a lot of coordination between the eyes and our motor skills.
“I would say that writing is one of the most complicated skills developed by humans,” says the expert to the BBC world service Crowdscience.
Sini’s main academic interest is to understand the different factors that make the letter of each of us unique.
“A written It depends on utensils and our hands. And when we think of hands, we talk about something very delicate, composed of 27 bones, which are controlled by more than 40 muscles, most of them located on the arm and connected with their fingers through an intricate trend network, ”he details.
This means that our handwriting is partly influenced by anatomy and genetic characteristics that we inherit of our parents.
In other words, the height, the way it sits, the angle of the notebook or paper, the firmness of your hand, being right -handed or left -handed… All this influences the shape of the letters and words you produce.
But there is also a cultural influence that cannot be ignored here. After all, we learned to hold pencils and pens at home in early childhood with the help of the elders.
The way they often use these utensils is passed onwhen the child makes his first strokes.
Soon after comes the school – and a new wave of influences from teachers and classmates.
Over the years, the tendency is that Our letter continues to change. Also, after the years of formation and learning, many of us began to write less in everyday life.
And the lack of habit, coupled with the hurry of everyday life, can make us less careful with how we draw letters, syllables, words, phrases, paragraphs…
Nor can you ignore here The role of new technologiesthat make us type more than writing by hand.
In one of his research, Sini wanted to better understand what were the most important factors behind an individual’s handwriting.
To this end, he elaborated a simple text about climate change, and asked a group of volunteers to copy the sentences, using the manual writing style to which they were used to.
Upon receiving the manuscripts, the anthropologist can evaluate elements such as the size of the letter, the shape of each symbol, the space between the words or how much the person could follow straight lines in the paragraphs.
“With the help of image recognition programs, it was possible to compare the writings with the pattern I had previously shared,” he says. “When the father teaches writing skills for his child, there is a high probability of find some similarity Between the two caligraffes. ”
“But the letter of a person is also influenced by school time or by Teacher’s style In particular ”, points out the researcher.
The brain during writing
Neuroscientist Marieke Longcamp of the University of Aix-Marselha in France studies how we are able to write.
For this, it uses magnetic resonance imaging, which allow view in real time The brain of people while they perform certain activities.
In one of these research, volunteers received a tablet capable of recording writing movements as they were examined.
Longcamp reports that it was possible observe the activation of various parts of the brainwho work together to enable the complex act of writing.
“Regions such as the premotor cortex, the primary motor cortex and parietal cortex are involved in the Planning and control of gestures Manuals ”, details, to CrowdScience.
“There are also influences of brain base structures, such as front turning, which is involved in aspects of language, and the fusiform turn, which processes written language.”
“Another fundamental structure here is the cerebellumwhich coordinates the movements and corrects our gestures, ”he adds.
The neuroscientist recalls that the handwriting basically depends on two -way: the vision and proprioception.
“Proprioception takes into account the information that comes from muscles, skin and all over the body. This is all encoded as we write,” he explains.
Is it possible to improve your letter?
But all this debate leads us to the discussion of the beginning of the report: Can authors with ugly letter have a better letter to improve readability and learn better?
In the CrowdScience program, London’s Cherrell Avery instructor Cherrell Avery has shared some tips that can help.
Her first orientation is “go slow“. We often write in a hurry – and we stop paying attention to the proper format of letters and words.
Avery also points out that it takes Understand each person’s styleeven to know the best writing utensil, the way to hold the pen/pencil, the proper posture, the type of paper, among other factors.
According to her, it is possible to improve handwriting through exercise.
“Of course a single training session is not enough to achieve significant changes,” he ponders.
But with a little insistence, it is possible Create a “muscle memory” which provides a new style of writing.
“At first this is a conscious effort. But gradually it becomes a habit and no longer thinks about this new way of writing,” he says.
Finally, Avery points out that handwriting is still important to us because it represents a “extension of our personality“.
“It’s as if we left a little of ourselves on that page.”
