As a child, I was squeezed, notorious and terribly insecure. I didn’t know what kind of real I was, hysterically looking for myself, so I rushed about in every possible way and often changed my handwriting. This was noticed by the Russian language teacher: she did not recognize my notebook, falling into a stupor from the letters, which gave a steep roll back. Being a good psychologist in her life, she asked me to come after the lesson. When I approached, she said very delicately:
“When a person changes handwriting, he tries to break himself and change his character. Better don't do it again. Accept yourself for who you are."
Genius and doodle
At the institute, at a lecture on psychology, a conversation turned on handwriting, and the teacher voiced that people with a narrow handwriting-fence almost always have a bad character. Our course looked at me with a silent smile. Nobody could even write off from me, because my notebooks looked like a maniac was having fun in them, hard, almost to the holes, carving a perpendicular fence there in every line.
It is said that all great people have illegible handwriting. In this case, doctors can be proud of their unprecedented genius, recognized during their lifetime. But teachers, alas! After all, legible handwriting is their sacred duty.
When I worked at a school, I realized how hard a teacher's bread is also because you need to prove yourself as a talented decoder of school scribbles. Even then I noticed, and in general I observe in my life, that women's handwriting is mostly more beautiful and understandable than that of men. And if I meet a man with a beautiful handwriting, then it touches me terribly. I had a classmate with a very sweet, even, slender and at the same time round handwriting. By the way, he was left-handed.
break the bank
A recent embarrassment at the bank led me to the topic of handwriting. I updated standard documents, signed a lot of things, but they... not accepted! They said that my signature did not look like the one on the signature card, and for some reason the handwriting itself was completely different, so problems could arise. They had to retype the documents, and I had to write the way I wrote in the old documents. Forging your own handwriting is another quest, I tell you!
While the bank employee was printing out the documents, she said that this was not the first time they had this. And what is surprising: people completely stopped writing by hand, so after a long break from respectable entrepreneur's handwriting becomes like that of a first-grader who has just learned "letters write different.
Healing by letter
In order to avoid further spelling embarrassment, I decided to approach the problem with all responsibility. She began to keep something like a diary with girlish thoughts, like enthusiastic eighth graders, and began to write down work affairs in a notebook instead of a smartphone. And the feeling is incredible! Weird and funny, but it's true. It is amazingly pleasant to write large texts by hand again. You feel calm and peaceful, which have a completely scientific explanation.
The benefits of writing on paper for mental health were first discussed by James Whiting Pennebaker, an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He became the founder of "writing therapy", recognized by the American Psychological Association.
Further research by the APA proved that handwriting not only helps to survive the negative emotional experience that "poured out" on paper, but also helps relieve stress, reduce anxiety, improve memory, and even help fight burnout by acting on the brain as meditation.
Research conducted in the United States on children and adolescents with attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, in once again proved the unconditional benefits of writing text by hand, which helps to focus and stop anxiety.
In a study called The Pen Is Stronger than the Keyboard, Pam Muller and Daniel Oppenheimer found that students who record lectures by hand are better at understanding the material than those who use laptop. The former were deeply aware and easily reproduced information, while the latter had a more superficial interpretation of what they typed.
American coach Daphne Gray-Grant (pictured above) advises combining both writing methods. She cites as an example the experience of the classics of literature of the 20th century, who had a typewriter instead of a computer. Thinking about the plots at the initial stage, they used pen and paper, as do many modern writers. So she does herself, recognizing the effectiveness of both methods for different purposes. Writing on paper helps you think, and typing speeds up the work, making the result easier to read.
So, friends, we get double leaves!
© Anastasia Sergeicheva
