I never liked writing by hand. Growing up, I envied the girls in my class whose squeezably round printed letters strung together like garlands, while I could barely keep my words inside the lines of a notebook. When my dad enrolled me in a typing class the summer between fourth and fifth grades, I learned my way around the QWERTY keyboard and never looked back.
Minus the usual Mavis Beacon CD-ROM, my story probably looks a lot like the trajectories of other millennials and Gen Zers. While we technically learned how to write by hand, many of us didn’t keep up the habit long enough for it to feel natural as adults.
I spend nearly every waking hour typing stories, emails, search queries, and text messages, but aside from a handful of greeting cards per year and the occasional halfhearted journal update, I rarely ever physically write.
So, when my editor here at Business Insider suggested that I try hand-writing my first draft for this story, I felt some dread. Wouldn’t it take forever to scratch my way through each alphabet letter? And would my editor be able to read it?
*(Editor’s note: Beyond the occasional inability to stay within the lines and a blurring between p’s and d’s, the author’s handwriting was legible. She just made the mistake of also filing a version of the draft in Google Docs, which was more legible.)*
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Many college students are now confronting the same handwriting-related worries. In an effort to curb AI plagiarism, professors are swapping out take-home essays and assignments for in-class exams and assessments. They’re banning screens and bringing back blue books—the robin’s-egg-hued notepaper booklets that were once a mainstay of college exams.
In short: Handwriting is so back.
This return to analog is exactly the opposite of what many have predicted since the dawn of the digital age. As recently as this August, Sridhar Vembu, the billionaire cofounder and former CEO of Zoho, predicted on X that “handwriting is going to be a lost art.”
Generative AI was expected to speed up the decline of pen-and-paper writing, not trigger its return to the halls of higher learning.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s been a bumpy ride. As one Ivy League professor recently confessed at our mutual friend’s get-together:
> “The handwriting is really, really, really bad.”
Just trying to read student assignments for grading purposes has become a whole new headache, doubling the time the task requires.
The road from perfect penmanship to chicken scratch in America is windy. Handwriting used to be a pillar of the American educational curriculum, one of the so-called “three Rs” alongside “reading” and “‘rithmetic.”
What that curriculum looked like at any given time had a lot to do with the labor-force needs of the era.
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As the US was shaping itself into the world’s industrial superpower in the mid-19th century, Platt Rogers Spencer, the “father of American handwriting,” popularized his intricate “Spencerian” script with the aim of developing meticulous, detail-focused future workers.
His approach became the standard in US classrooms until the early 20th century, when it was replaced by the more utilitarian Palmer Method—a cursive technique that prioritized speed and legibility for the machine age.
Christopher Hamner, a history professor at George Mason University, tells his students, “If I can’t read it, you don’t get points.”
But by the late 1970s, handwriting instruction was already on the decline, says Jonathan Dubay, the CEO of Handwriting Success. Electric typewriters had become widely available, and teaching kids how to write had always been a hassle.
“Teachers had to spend a lot of time on it, kids weren’t remembering how to do it, and there was a lot of recidivism. It wasn’t working.”
That’s when Dubay’s mother, Inga, joined forces with the calligraphy instructor Barbara Getty to develop a handwriting curriculum for elementary school students using their patented Getty-Dubay Italic, which sought to marry the ease of printing with the speed of writing in cursive.
The Getty-Dubay system gained traction, but not enough to reverse handwriting’s trajectory of neglect.
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By the late 2000s, articles in the New York Times and TIME mourned the demise of “a legible hand,” especially in cursive, which American schools had largely stopped bothering to teach altogether.
In the years that followed, the ubiquity of smartphones seemed like the final nail in the coffin for the handwritten word.
And now ChatGPT and other AI text generators have immediately proved to be high-tech homework-cheating machines.
While some professors tinkered with AI-detection tools to root out plagiarism, others opted to go analog.
Last May, the Wall Street Journal reported a surge in Blue Book sales across several US universities as evidence of the trend.
Roaring Spring Paper Products, the company that makes Blue Books, confirms year-over-year sales increases since ChatGPT became widely available in late 2022.
However, a spokesperson tells me that global sales are still well below their pre-pandemic numbers, explaining that the switch to online learning hastened a takeover of online exams.
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COVID also sped up the deterioration of handwriting.
Christopher Hamner recalls a time earlier in his teaching career when students had “attractive” handwriting. These days, he says it’s more often “appalling,” and he points to the pandemic as a culprit.
Today’s undergrads were in middle and high school when the world went into lockdown and learning went online, which cost students precious handwriting practice as teens.
Unfortunately, the lack of practice shows.
“About a quarter print neatly, and the rest are hard to read,” says Hamner, who brought back Blue Book exams last year. “I tell them, ‘If I can’t read it, you don’t get points.'”
Sarah Schoemann, a computer science professor at the College of Charleston, has heard the horror stories. She’s chosen to pivot to in-class handwritten evaluations anyway following a “rude awakening” with a 3D modeling class last spring.
Students were supposed to build an outdoor scene showing rain or snow using premade models and their own particle effects; many submitted nearly identical, low-quality gray palm trees with nondescript particle details falling over them.
When Schoemann tested the assignment prompt in ChatGPT, it produced the same output the students had turned in.
Though the writing requirements are fairly minimal for Schoemann’s courses, they’re enough to generate sympathy for her colleagues in other departments.
> “Humanities and social sciences faculty are struggling.”
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Despite the ongoing backslide, general interest in handwriting has been quietly percolating for years.
Dubay has seen a swell in handwriting-instruction app sales over the past decade, some of which he attributes to the rise of homeschooling.
“In general, parents have decided they want their young students to have a handwriting experience,” he says.
Cursive writing is making a comeback of its own.
This summer, Pennsylvania legislators passed a bill that would require cursive handwriting instruction in the state’s public schools, citing “compelling cognitive, developmental, and practical reasons for ensuring students have at least a basic grasp” of the skill.
If the bill gets signed into law, Pennsylvania will become the 26th state to mandate teaching cursive—a figure that’s nearly doubled since 2016.
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Handwriting forces a level of decisiveness that I’ve all but eradicated from my usual creative process.
There are practical reasons to celebrate the revival, such as preserving the ability to read archival documents in the case of cursive.
But there are likely cognitive benefits to handwriting, too, regardless of the form.
In a 2021 study published in *Psychological Science*, people who took physical notes absorbed and remembered new information better than those who typed.
Others are drawn to hand-hewn lettering for the same reasons they might be inclined to take up basket-weaving or buy a bookcase built from scratch. In today’s slick screen-filled world, there’s something to be said for craftsmanship, and the practice of slowing down to create something new and beautiful from beginning to end.
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A Reddit group dedicated to practicing and improving handwriting is one of the platform’s largest at over 1 million members, while TikTok and YouTube boast a burgeoning cadre of handwriting-focused content creators.
I, on the other hand, have been slow to get the memo.
Apart from a handful of Blue Book exams in college, I probably haven’t handwritten at length since middle school—a long, long time ago.
But I did take physical notes throughout high school and college, where I recall preferring the pleasing scratch of a mechanical pencil over the scratchy drag of ballpoint pens.
So when it came time to draft this article, I returned to my old pal, the Bic #2.
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Even with the right tools, my technique was sorely lacking.
I struggled to close the loops on my lower-case ‘a’s and ‘o’s, which made them both look like the letter ‘u.’
I developed cramps across every finger on my writing hand and riled up a sports injury in my right elbow.
Frustrations aside, writing by hand made me feel more plugged into what I was trying to express.
I can type about as quickly as I can think, which means I often don’t give myself the time to properly think through a point before putting it on the page (or, more accurately, the screen).
I wind up typing and retyping the same sentences and paragraphs as I hone my thinking along the way.
Handwriting, on the other hand (right, in my case), forces a level of decisiveness that I’ve all but eradicated from my usual creative process.
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“Technology can make answers easy but also paralyze students with too many options,” says Russell Seidle, a business professor at Suffolk University in Boston who has used Blue Book exams in his classes since 2013.
After briefly experimenting with an online-first approach during the pandemic, Seidle realized that handwritten exams developed stronger reasoning skills by forcing students to commit to one answer, justify it, and show how they got there.
For students relearning to digest information without the help of AI, writing by hand facilitates a potentially transformative shift.
It may also prove beneficial for their professional futures.
After all, the most valuable workers are those that can think for themselves, whether or not that process involves feeding the right prompts to a machine.
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Hamner, the history professor, tells his students that using AI for reading is like having someone else eat your ice cream sundae for you.
The same could be said for writing, a process of coming up with an idea and working through it from beginning to end.
> “The joy is in doing it yourself,” he says. “Handwritten exercises help students reconnect with that.”
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*Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She’s based in New York City.*
https://www.businessinsider.com/professors-fighting-ai-handwriting-chatgpt-blue-books-2025-11