What times were you exchanging papers with your classmates and you used to stay in the same place and place. Now the most normal thing is to use chats through messaging apps or social networks to communicate. Generation Z was born in the digital age and that means great advantages such as total integration with devices and the internet. But it also has side effects and one is as serious as lose an ability that has accompanied humanity for more than 5,5000 years: hand writing.

It was the Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations who began this art and form of communication, which was later restricted to certain social segments, such as the clergy and high society. It was not until the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the printing press that learning to read and write began to become democratized. But handwriting is being lost among the youth and not only that, also communicative fluency has fallen by 40%.

Digital writing takes its toll on generation Z

Türkiye Today echoes several studies and statements by professors from different universities, reaching a conclusion: Generation Z has become so accustomed to digital writing that the transition to traditional handwriting is choking. But be careful, not to any digital writing: also to classic PC keyboardsso the main suspect is the mobile phone and its apps, where they are true experts.

Like any other skill, when it is not practiced frequently it becomes rusty and handwriting is not an exception. Thus, in addition to the loss of certain spelling rules as a result of informal and abbreviated writing, youth have been losing the ability to write by hand, which translates into write crooked lines and unintelligible handwriting.

As evidenced by a study of the University of Stavanger In Norway, with just one year focusing only on digital writing, 40% of the student body lost fluency in their handwriting. And that’s not the worst thing: the fact that social networks are the goal of Generation Z’s texts has the consequence that avoid long sentences and fail to construct meaningful paragraphs.

Whether by hand or with their mobile phone, Gen Z fails to create paragraphs with long, independent sentences and also to correctly structure arguments, which means that it is more difficult to try to understand their texts. But not everything is bad: its synthesis capacity to explain any concept in 10 words or less has improved considerably. Of course, if what we have to do is go deeper, the mission becomes complicated.

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