It is a gloomy Sunday night. You have been sitting at your desk, cooped up in your bedroom for the last three hours working on an essay for your English class. You are close to finishing when suddenly…your computer glitches and your work hasn’t been saved. NOOO! Four pages of hard work…it’s mercilessly disappeared. Now, if you were hand writing it, this unfortunate situation could have been avoided. However, as technology progresses, pens and pencils have become vestiges of a bygone era. 
Unquestionably, there are benefits to using modern technology such as computers.
 “It saves a lot of paper and typing is faster,” senior Alexa Seefeldt said. 

Computers are more eco-friendly than chopping down trees for paper. Additionally, writing is more time-consuming than typing. For example, someone with poor handwriting may take longer to write to ensure their writing is legible. A neat freak may be particular about the spacing between words, the size of each letter, etc. resulting in multiple I have to rewrite that moments. However, technology is unreliable compared to the old school pen and paper:
“Keeping things on a computer is a good way to organize, but for me personally, I don’t “trust” that I won’t lose a document on the computer, which is why I prefer to print documents out and file them in my own way,” psychology teacher Elyse Freudenfels said. 
Not only is there the benefit of reliability, but writing by hand also strengthens your mind in multiple ways.
“The reticular activating system is stimulated [when writing by hand],” health and wellness writer Shaun D’Mello of MedIndia indicates. “[It] acts as a filter for all the sensory information you receive from your environment and “decides” which bits of information are important and which ones can be ignored … it helps the individual focus on the task at hand with minimal scope of distraction.”
According to the National Pen, handwriting enhances your conceptual thinking; it requires you to think and process the content being read. 
“In my environmental science class and math class I have to hand write everything,” Seefeldt said.
According to the National pen, “handwriting forces your brain to mentally engage with the information, improving both literacy and reading comprehension … [while] typing encourages verbatim notes without giving much thought to the information.”
In a class like environmental science, it is necessary to retain information and handwriting allows for a better recollection. In a class like math, typing out equations and crossing off numbers to solve problems is not as efficient as doing the work on paper.
With the shift to online learning, work is to be completed on computers and to be virtually submitted to teachers. Regardless, it is important to incorporate writing as much as possible, whether it’s writing your essay for class on paper and then typing it on a document, or rewriting your notes as a method of studying. Additionally, maintaining a journal to write in daily provides the added benefit of improving your communication skills.
There are endless ways to continue writing the old fashioned way. For those of you complaining about your handwriting: in most cases, the more you write, the better your handwriting will get.
Happy writing!