Transcription Fluency
When you write something down, either while taking notes or while trying to write your own original thoughts, you’re dealing with what literacy scholars call “transcription fluency”: How quickly and fluidly you can get down?—?“transcribe”?—?the stuff that’s in your head. One of the reasons we formally teach handwriting to young children is that you don’t want a bottleneck between the ideas they’re forming and the writing. If you struggle with the act of forming letters and words, you’ve got less mental juice (working memory, executive control) left over to manage your higher-level processes: Pondering the flow of your argument, the points you’re aiming to make, alternate phrasings. Decades of literacy research generally show that kids who handwrite more fluidly perform better in tests and on essays than those who write slowly. This is precisely why teaching handwriting remains crucial. “If you can’t move quickly enough, your idea can slip away and never come back,” as Steve Graham, a noted literacy scholar at Arizona State University, tells me.
Notes:
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The Joy of Typing