I’m not sure which poet said that, for her, writing is a physical process. She had to feel her arm and hand doing the work of the writing and the thoughts came from her mind down her arm and into her hand.

An article about children and handwriting reminded me of that quote.

In our house, the little one has gleefully been writing the letter “O.” This appears to be her favorite letter. “O” was the first letter she learned. She would see it on shirts and exclaim in delight. She spotted an “O” in the coil of telephone wire on a pole near our home and pointed it out to us.

Then, I found this article:

The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing

This is the abstract:

A large body of data supports the view that movement plays a crucial role in letter representation and suggests that handwriting contributes to the visual recognition of letters. If so, changing the motor conditions while children are learning to write by using a method based on typing instead of handwriting should affect their subsequent letter recognition performances. In order to test this hypothesis, we trained two groups of 38 children (aged 3–5 years) to copy letters of the alphabet either by hand or by typing them. After three weeks of learning, we ran two recognition tests, one week apart, to compare the letter recognition performances of the two groups. The results showed that in the older children, the handwriting training gave rise to a better letter recognition than the typing training.

I was pleasantly reminded of how important the body is to learning. The findings above do not surprise me. Don’t most of us learn by doing? Someone can explain how to put a needle into someone’s skin for acupuncture, write a poem, plant an azalea bush or drive a car. However, it’s not until we DO it that we understand it and learn the nuances such as “knowing” when another driver plans to cut us off or when a poem is working or how to fertilize an azalea.

As I drive into work, I’ve often wondered how I “know” that someone will cut me off or wants to get in front of me. The other day, a truck wanted to move in front of me. He actually used a turn signal, so I could tell he really wanted to move right. I “knew” he wanted to move from the left lane all the way to right. DH let the person in, and the person did move all the way to the right.

How did I know? I am not 100% sure. However, I have some guesses. I am familiar with the traffic pattern there and know that knowing which lane to be in is quite tricky and that being in the wrong lane is something I’ve done myself. Even without a turn signal, in other situations, I can tell when people want to get in because they start to move over before they’ve cleared my car. They are not going to hit me. It’s more that the idea to move is in their head and they are already moving the car over the smallest little bit. Maybe everyone notices this.

These kind of details can only be learned by experience and by the physical experience of driving a car and getting used to how others behave on the road. Why would learning the alphabet be any different?