National Handwriting Day

The Most Famous Signature in America

National Handwriting Day falls on January 23, the birthday of John Hancock. That’s a deliberate choice. Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence so large and bold that his name became a synonym for a signature. “Put your John Hancock here.” A holiday about handwriting couldn’t have a better patron.

The day celebrates writing by hand, a skill slowly disappearing. Keyboards took over, then phones, and now a lot of people go days without writing a single word with a pen. Whole generations are growing up barely able to read cursive, let alone write it. The handwritten word is sliding toward the same fate as the handwritten letter, technically still possible, practically extinct.

I’m not going to pretend I write by hand much. Like everyone, I do most of my writing on a screen. But there’s a real reason to keep a pen in rotation, and it’s not nostalgia.

Watch: The History of Writing - Where the Story Begins - Extra History, Extra History

What the Pen Does That the Keyboard Doesn’t

Writing by hand does something for the brain that typing doesn’t.

Handwriting is slower. When you type, you can capture words almost as fast as you think them. That sounds like an advantage but isn’t. You end up transcribing instead of thinking. When you write by hand, you can’t keep up, so your brain is forced to process and compress, to decide what matters and put only that on the page.

Studies on note-taking have found that students who write notes by hand remember and understand more than students who type, because the slowness forces them to think instead of just record.

For a writer, that’s real uses. There’s a reason a lot of writers still draft by hand, or at least plan by hand. The pen slows you down to the speed of thought, and for certain kinds of work, slower thinking is better thinking. The keyboard is faster. The pen is deeper.

When to Reach for the Pen

You don’t have to abandon the keyboard. Most writing is faster and cleaner typed, and that’s fine. But there are moments where the pen wins.

Use it for thinking. When you’re stuck on a problem, planning a structure, or trying to work out what you believe about something, write it by hand.

The slowness will help. Use it for memory too, the note you write by hand is the note you’ll remember. And use it for the personal, the thank-you, the condolence, the note that means more because someone took the time. Those are the same reasons the handwritten letter still matters, which I wrote about for Letter Writing Day.

How do you spend National Handwriting Day?

Write something by hand. Anything. A page in a notebook, a to-do list, a letter to someone, just to feel the difference.

If you haven’t handwritten more than a grocery list in months, the strangeness of it’ll tell you something about how far the skill has slipped. Try drafting something by hand and notice how differently your brain works at pen speed. And if your handwriting has degraded into an unreadable scrawl, like most people’s, this is a fine day to slow down and write one page legibly. The pen is still here, waiting for the moments the keyboard can’t do as well.

National Handwriting Day FAQ