Plonking a child in front of a laptop may not be the right solution for those who have difficulty writing down their thoughts, according to a new study. And it shows that even children without any specific transcription difficulty benefit from using a pen rather than a keyboard at least some of the time.

I recently heard a report of a primary school that had completely done away with paper and pens. Wrong move, says Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology who studies normal writing development and writing disabilities. Her study of second, fourth and sixth grade children showed that they consistently did better with a pen when they wrote essays.

Only for writing the alphabet was the keyboard better than the pen. For sentences results were mixed. But when using a pen, the children in all three grade levels produced longer essays and composed them at a faster pace. In addition, fourth and sixth graders wrote more complete sentences when they used a pen. The ability to write complete sentences was not affected by the children’s spelling skills.

The research also showed that many children don’t have a reliable idea of what a sentence is until the third or fourth grade.

(And some, well beyond that stage of their schooling.)

“Children first have to understand what a sentence or a complete thought is before they can write one,” Berninger said. “Talking is very different from writing. We don’t talk in complete sentence. In conversation we produce units smaller and larger than sentences.”

The professor points out that schools often allow children to use laptops to bypass handwriting and spelling problems, but that may not be enough. “Children with this disability also need appropriate education in the form of explicit transcription and composition instruction.”

Not enough is known yet about the process of writing with a computer, she says, and children need to become “bilingual writers”, using both pen and keyboard.

“But we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that it is important for developing writers and children with transcription disability to be able to form letters by hand. A keyboard doesn’t allow a child to have the same opportunity to engage the hand while forming letters – on a keyboard a letter is selected by pressing a key and is not formed. Brain imaging studies with adults have shown an advantage for forming letters over selecting or viewing letters. A brain imaging study at the University of Washington with children showed that sequencing fingers may engage thinking. We need more research to figure out how forming letters by a pen and selecting them by pressing a key may engage our thinking brains differently.”

So even adults probably should switch off the laptop sometimes, get out a nice pen and paper, and do some real writing.