Hearing words, writing sounds: examining the author’s brain

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This article is from theguardian.com by Richard Lea.

thinkingThe novelist Kamila Shamsie measures out her life as an author in chapters, punctuated by a familiar ritual.

“Usually at the end of writing every chapter I’ll print out and read aloud,” she says. It’s something she’s been doing since university, she continues, citing the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, who told her “there are things the ears pick up which the eyes don’t”. As she sits on the lookout for repeated words, unexpected clunks or unwanted dissonances, it “feels like listening”.

“I don’t know how to say that any better. It’s about the sound of the sentences.” After years of “developing your ear for the sounds of language” she doesn’t have to think about “why a particular clump of syllables sounds wrong to my ear. I just know that it does.” Read more →

Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing’s on the wall

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Keyboards are fine for communicating with machines, but handwriting captures the disconnected and chaotic patterns of real thought.

This article is from theguardian.com by Andrew Brown.

Andrew-Browns-handwriting-008Swedish schools are considering whether to abandon the teaching of handwriting. They will continue to teach block capitals, but the subtleties of cursive writing will no longer be transmitted outside the elite. This seems to me to lose one of the most wonderful cognitive tools ever invented. Handwriting helps you think. The physicality of it makes the associated mental processes clearer and more memorable.

This kind of argument is quite wasted on educational bureaucrats, for whom the question is whether children can learn to type faster and more clearly than they can write by hand. After all, there’s no call for handwriting in most jobs today, any more than there is any requirement for independent thought.

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