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Test your typing online by practicing on your favorite literature. Choose a book below to get started, or subscribe and import your own!

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Typing Lessons

Take a typing speed test, learn to type faster and with fewer errors with this free online typing tutor.

This site lets you type out entire novels to brush up on your skills

TypeLit.io is perfect for literature fiends and typing novices

A website is taking the English saying about "killing two birds with one stone" to practice. Not literally, don't worry. TypeLit.io is a website that says it will help you improve your typing skills without charging anything and get you to read those classic titles you have been avoiding all your life. How? By typing them out.

What comes with TypeLit.io — While you're improving your typing skills, you will be working through some major literature thanks to TypeLit.io.

The website packs titles like 1984 by George Orwell, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, and a lot more. There are seven languages you can sharpen your typing skills in: English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Plus, you can track your progress and auto-save wherever you left off.

What a test run looks like — You're typing down chapters, that's all there is to it. But while it sounds super simple and maybe even boring, the website is tracking your speed and accuracy all at once while you're stepping inside a fictional world.

I ran 1984 to see how TypeLit.io works. The first chapter of Orwell's book takes off by by painting a rather frigid April morning at the Victory mansions while Winston Smith is trying to get some sleep. I was too busy reading the beginning to even notice that I was practicing some typing on the website. When you get it right, the cursor blinks green. When you get a spelling wrong or backtrack several times, the cursor turns red.

Little tools like TypeLit.io make the internet a bearable place. Sure, we have Nazis on Twitter and QAnon on Facebook openly theorizing about a Satanic cabal eating children for breakfast but sometimes people come up with pleasant and simple ideas that can make the day a little better and more useful.

So if you've ever wondered what the hell Marcus Aurelius was saying in Meditations (jokes aside, it is a beautiful and stoic rumination on life, governance, philosophy, people, war, and more) and you're trying to build up your typing speed, TypeLit.io is worth a shot. It's all about killing two birds with one stone. Again, not literally. Birds are cool. Sometimes they're so cool, people make virtual museums about them .

How To Type

Free typing lessons, typing practice and typing tests., learn how to type with how-to-type.com, typing lessons, learn to type.

Graduate from hunt-and-peck to touch typing mastery with our complete course of free touch typing lessons.

• Capital Letters
• Punctuation

Typing Practice

Practice typing.

Practice is the key to developing excellent typing skills. Make it fun by typing great quotes from great books!

Typing Tests

Typing speed tests.

Evaluate your skills and measure your progress by taking a typing test.

How to Type: 5 Tips for Faster Typing

Learn to touch type..

If you don’t know how to touch type, this is where you need to start. Having the ability to type without looking at the keyboard is the most important factor in achieving a fast typing speed. Even if you have memorized many of the keys, unfamiliar keys will slow you down just like speed bumps on the freeway. Taking your eyes off the screen to peek at the keyboard disrupts your focus and costs you time. You want to be able to keep your eyes on the screen and your fingers moving to the correct keys without thinking. Achieving this kind of flow takes practice. The better you can do it, the faster you will be. Read on to learn how.

Aim for accuracy rather than speed.

It does not matter how fast you type if you have to go back and fix all your mistakes. Fixing mistakes takes more time than it does to just slow down and take the time you need to type accurately. Fast typing depends on developing precision muscle memory. Allowing yourself to type incorrectly will actually reinforce your bad habits and common mistakes! Slow your typing pace until you can attain 100% accuracy. If you come across a difficult word, slow down further to type it properly. Develop good habits and speed will be your reward.

Practice typing exercises regularly.

Mastering typing skills takes training and practice. Practice typing on a regular schedule, 10 minutes to an hour per session, depending on your energy and focus level. Practice won’t make perfect if it is half-hearted and full of mistakes, so is important that you practice your typing exercises at a time and place where you can maintain focus and accuracy. Eliminate any potential distractions. If you find yourself making lots of errors, slow down and find a way to regain your focus or call it a day. The goal of practicing is to build muscle memory. Be consistent and mindful in your practice and you will avoid bad habits and mistakes.

Minimize your physical effort.

The less work your fingers do to press the keys the faster you will be able to move them. Most keyboards require only a light touch to register a key stroke, so there is no need to mash the keys down. Type with the minimum force necessary. You will type faster, longer and with greater ease. Typing involves muscles not only in your fingers, but in your hands, arms, back, shoulders, neck and head.

Learn the entire keyboard.

You may have enough experience typing to know most of the common keys - the letters, the space bar, enter, and I’ll bet you know that backspace! But you might be uncomfortable with some of the keys you don’t use as frequently. Do you have to slow down and look at the keyboard to type a number or symbol? If you program or work with spreadsheets you will use the symbol keys frequently. If you are a gamer there are probably CTRL, ALT and function keys that you fumble for in the heat of the battle. In fact, most all programs can be used more productively with effectively use of key combo shortcuts. Hitting these awkward keys and combos accurately allows you to maintain focus on what you are doing, so make sure you include them in your typing practice.

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Classical Literature Typing Test

Learn something new as you improve your typing with this english literature typing test. Practice typing excerpts from your favorite classics! Over 70 passages from the best loved books available.

If you don't like a test prompt, you can get a different (random) prompt with the "change test" button - or select a passage from specific book to type from the list below. To find out how fast you type, just start typing in the blank textbox on the right of the test prompt. You will see your progress, including errors on the left side as you type. In order to complete the test and save your score, you need to get 100% accuracy. You can fix errors as you go, or correct them at the end with the help of the spell checker.

Personalized Feedback

This feedback graph will follow you from page to page for your typing session. You can see more details by mousing over the graph. The session is reset when the tab on your browser is closed.

Type this... CHANGE TEST

Test begins when you start typing..., check your wpm typing speed here.

To find out how fast you type, just start typing in the blank textbox on the right of the test prompt. You will see your progress, including errors on the left side as you type.

You can fix errors as you go, or correct them at the end with the help of the spell checker. If you need to restart the test, delete the text in the text box. Interactive feedback shows you your current wpm and accuracy.

In order to complete the test and share your results, you need to get 100% accuracy. You can review your progress for this session with the feedback chart. Just hover over a dot to see what your average speed and accruacy are for that key.

Letter Drills

A | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z.

Select a Specific Typing Test:

Click on a topic to use it as your test prompt. Selections are ranked according to difficulty from '*' (easiest typing tests) to '*****' (most challenging typing tests). For more details, check the difficulty key at the bottom of the page.

Short typing tests for beginners: (1 - 3 minute typing test at < 30 wpm)

• 'The War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells (44 words) **
• 'Ulysses' by James Joyce (60.2 words) ***
• 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' by Washington Irving (60.2 words) ***
• 'The Raven' by Edgar Allan Poe (73 words) ***
• 'The Canterbury Tales' by Geoffrey Chaucer (74.6 words) **
• 'The Importance of Being Earnest', by Oscar Wilde (77.2 words) ***
• 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde (81.6 words) ***
• 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen (82.8 words) **
• 'Notes from the Underground' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (88.4 words) *
• 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens (89.2 words) **

Intermediate typing tests: (3-6 minutes at 40 wpm)

• 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit' by Beatrix Potter (94 words) **
• 'Macbeth' by William Shakespeare (105.4 words) **
• 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (109 words) **
• 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert (119 words) **
• 'The Odyssey' by Homer (126 words) **
• 'A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens (131.4 words) *
• 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte (131.4 words) ***
• 'Emma' by Jane Austen (134.8 words) **
• 'Treasure Island' by Robert Louis Stevenson (135.8 words) *
• 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (135.4 words) ***
• 'The Prince' by Nicolo Machiavelli (137.4 words) **
• 'Don Juan' by Lord Byron (138 words) ***
• 'Le Morte D'Arthur' by Thomas Malory (140 words) *
• 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte (140.2 words) ***
• 'A Princess of Mars' by Edgar Rice Burroughs (143 words) *
• 'The Jungle Book' by Rudyard Kipling (145 words) **
• 'The Secret Garden' by Frances Hodgson Burnett (151 words) **
• 'War and Peace' by Leo Tolstoy (153 words) ***
• 'Ethan Frome' by Edith Wharton (163.6 words) **
• 'Around the World in 80 Days' by Jules Verne (169.4 words) **
• 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray (173.2 words) ***
• 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (178.6 words) **
• 'The Call of the Wild' by Jack London (178.6 words) ***
• 'Dubliners' by James Joyce (183.8 words) *
• 'The Three Musketeers' by Alexandre Dumas (187.4 words) ***
• 'The Turn of the Screw' by Henry James (193 words) **
• 'The Jungle' by Upton Sinclair (197.6 words) **
• 'A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens (197.8 words) *
• 'Les Miserables' by Victor Hugo (198.6 words) **

Hard typing tests for advanced typists: (over 4 minutes at 60+ wpm)

• 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift (203.4 words) **
• 'Frankenstein' by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (202.6 words) **
• 'Middlemarch' by George Eliot (203.8 words) ***
• 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' by L. Frank Baum (204.2 words) *
• 'The Last of the Mohicans' by James Fenimore Cooper (208.8 words) ***
• 'Peter Pan' by James M. Barrie (214.4 words) **
• 'The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson) (218.2 words) **
• 'Gulliver's Travels' by Jonathan Swift (225.4 words) *
• 'Moby Dick' by Herman Melville (229.2 words) **
• 'The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe' by Daniel Defoe (231.4 words) *
• 'Candide' by Voltaire (234.8 words) ***
• 'A Room With A View' by E. M. Forster (234.6 words) **
• 'Dracula' by Bram Stoker (237.6 words) **
• 'Anna Karenina' by Leo Tolstoy (239.2 words) **
• (242 words) **
• 'The Dunwich Horror' by H. P. Lovecraft (243.4 words) **
• 'Sense and Sensibility' by Jane Austen (243.4 words) **
• 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald (243.4 words) ***
• 'Memoirs Of Fanny Hill' by John Cleland (251.4 words) **
• 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad (255.8 words) **
• 'The Wind in the Willows' by Kenneth Grahame (261 words) **
• 'Anne of Green Gables' by Lucy Maud Montgomery (273 words) **
• 'The Scarlet Letter' by Nathaniel Hawthorne (292 words) ***
• 'The Time Machine' by H. G. Wells (294.4 words) **
• 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' by Mark Twain (294.8 words) **
• 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' by Thomas Hardy (295 words) ***
• 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' by Mark Twain (299.2 words) *
• 'The Count of Monte Cristo' by Alexandre Dumas (299.2 words) ***
• 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll (299.2 words) **
• 'Little Women' by Louisa May Alcott (309.6 words) **
• 'Leviathan' by Thomas Hobbes (312.6 words) **
• 'Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka (341.2 words) **
• 'Ivanhoe' by Sir Walter Scott (348.6 words) **
• 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens (355.4 words) **

If you have a topic that you would like to see added to the list above, please feel free to contact us with your suggestion for a new paragraph typing test.

Typing Test Difficulty Levels

Our typing tests are ranked on level of difficulty. The algorithm to calculate difficulty depends on the average word length and how many special characters like capitals, numbers and symbols are included in the text. Most standard pre-employment typing tests will be in the normal range. You should expect to get higher wpm scores on easier tests and lower wpm scores on the more difficult tests.

• * Very Easy Typing Test
• ** Easy Typing Test
• *** Normal Typing Test
• **** Difficult Typing Test
• ***** Very Difficult Typing Test

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Online typing lessons

Click on a typing lesson on the list below. The exercise will begin as soon as you press the first key.

Start random lesson

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Some of these exercises are not fully supported by your keyboard layout and may behave differently from what is expected by the exercise description.

First steps lessons ?

First and very easy typing lessons for learning all key positions. Suitable for beginners.

• Base position dynamic generic 7 signs
• Home row dynamic generic 9 signs
• Home row and top row dynamic generic 19 signs
• Home row and bottom row dynamic generic 16 signs
• All letters dynamic generic 26 signs
• All rows dynamic generic 36 signs

Warm-up exercises ?

Easy typing lessons for learning all key positions. Suitable for beginners.

• Top row dynamic generic 10 signs
• Bottom row dynamic generic 7 signs
• Number row dynamic generic 10 signs
• Home row and number row dynamic generic 19 signs

Learn exercises ?

First easy exercises to learn touch typing step by step.

• Base position [h4:h7] dynamic generic 2 signs
• Base position [h4:h7:h3:h8] dynamic generic 4 signs
• Base position [h4:h7:h3:h8:h2:h9] dynamic generic 6 signs
• Base position complete dynamic generic 8 signs
• Base position + [h5:h6] dynamic generic 10 signs
• Home row dynamic generic 11 signs
• Home row + [t3:b7] dynamic generic 13 signs
• Home row + [t3:b7:t8:t4] dynamic generic 15 signs
• Home row + [t3:b7:t8:t4:t5:t7] dynamic generic 17 signs
• Home row + [t3:b7:t8:t4:t5:t7:b4:b8] dynamic generic 19 signs
• Home row + [t3:b7:t8:t4:t5:t7:b4:b8:t9:b6] dynamic generic 21 signs
• Home row + [t3:b7:t8:t4:t5:t7:b4:b8:t9:b6:t1:t2:t10:b5] dynamic generic 25 signs
• Home row + [t3:b7:t8:t4:t5:t7:b4:b8:t9:b6:t1:t2:t10:b5:b3:b2:t6] dynamic generic 28 signs

Word exercises ?

Typing lessons with words that reveal more and more letters. Perfect to practice typing step by step.

• Home row dynamic 12 signs
• Home row + EN dynamic 12 signs
• Home row + ENIR dynamic 14 signs
• Home row + ENIRTU dynamic 18 signs
• Home row + ENIRTUCM dynamic 18 signs
• Home row + ENIRTUCMOB dynamic 20 signs
• Home row + ENIRTUCMOBWYP dynamic 29 signs
• Home row + ENIRTUCMOBWYPQVXZ dynamic 27 signs

Finger practice ?

Exercises with randomly placed letters. For users who wants to improve their finger skills.

• Home row and right top row dynamic generic 16 signs
• Home row and left top row dynamic generic 16 signs
• Home and top row dynamic generic 21 signs
• Home row and right bottom row dynamic generic 16 signs
• Home row and left bottom row dynamic generic 17 signs
• Home and bottom row dynamic generic 22 signs
• Home and right number row dynamic generic 17 signs
• Home and left number row dynamic generic 17 signs
• Home and number row dynamic generic 23 signs
• All letters dynamic generic 32 signs
• All rows dynamic generic 44 signs

Hand practice ?

Easy typing lessons for each hand separately. Suitable for users who wants to train one hand.

• Left hand - home row dynamic generic 5 signs
• Left hand - home and top row dynamic generic 10 signs
• Left hand - home and bottom row dynamic generic 11 signs
• Left hand - home and number row dynamic generic 11 signs
• Left hand - all letters dynamic generic 16 signs
• Left hand - all rows dynamic generic 22 signs
• Right hand - home row dynamic generic 6 signs
• Right hand - home and top row dynamic generic 11 signs
• Right hand - home and bottom row dynamic generic 11 signs
• Right hand - home and number row dynamic generic 11 signs
• Right hand - all letters dynamic generic 16 signs
• Right hand - all rows dynamic generic 21 signs

Practical exercises ?

Practice-oriented typing of the most common english words. Perfect to prepare for real life.

• Top 25 english words dynamic 18 signs
• Top 50 english words dynamic 23 signs
• Top 100 english words dynamic 24 signs
• Top 200 english words dynamic 26 signs
• Top 300 english words dynamic 29 signs
• Top 500 english words dynamic 34 signs
• Top 1000 english words dynamic 41 signs

Bonus lessons ?

More demanding exercises from all keyboard rows with special characters plus uppercase letters.

• Phonetic alphabet dynamic 49 signs
• Lorem ipsum dynamic 28 signs
• Capitals of Europe dynamic 36 signs
• Tongue twisters dynamic 29 signs
• Sayings dynamic 29 signs
• Written numbers dynamic 20 signs
• The complete alphabet dynamic 53 signs

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With the new Pro version you have access to more great features that boost your typing practice. See for yourself:

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Create your own typing lessons

As a registered user you can create up to 10 own lessons and thereby practice your keyboarding skills even more targeted.

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More than just simple typing practice

The typing lessons in our typing tutor are not just static texts. They are recombined in each exercise and adapt to your typing habits:

Dynamic typing lessons

All typing lessons marked as dynamic are reassembled each time you start a exercise in our typing tutor . This not only makes the exercises extremely varied, but also ensures that you don't memorize them by repetition.

Intelligent error analysis

Thanks to the intelligent error analysis in our typing tutor words and strings in which you often make mistakes will be repeated more frequently during your practice. This means that your personal weaknesses are trained directly and without any action on your part.

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Training objective

10 Words / min.

10% Error rate

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At TypingAcademy you can easily learn how to type with ten fingers. Our free online typing tutor helps you to practice touch typing in such a way that you can improve your finger technique noticeably in the long term and type faster and more comfortable. Thanks to the various typing lessons, you can learn how to type like in a course at school or in a coaching. And since our typing tutor runs as a web service directly online in the browser, you can use it on every platform.

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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

Is this some kind of joke? A school facing shortages starts teaching standup comedy

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

• handwriting

Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

Copyright 2024 NPR

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Typing Practice: Stephen Pinot Kindle Edition

• Print length 298 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publication date July 23, 2019
• File size 1288 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07VMJ5X5K
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ My Ideas; 1st edition (July 23, 2019)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 23, 2019
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1288 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 298 pages
• #2,229 in United States Drama & Plays
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About the author

Stephen pinot.

Stephen Pinot was born in the dog days of the summer of 1960. Stephen always had a creative streak, writing short stories as a child, later music and lyrics. Stephen struggled through a difficult childhood and later went on to be the CEO of several companies. During that time he continued to write business related pieces, marketing pieces, website content, food and wine articles, business plans and countless business correspondence. He continued to write music, poetry and short stories during what spare time he could muster. He now persues his passion and love of writing and intends to ride his typewriter into the sunset. Typing Practice is his first full length novel. I suspect there will be more to follow.

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