July 8, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Letter You Make, You Keep
The Hand Was Teaching the Brain.
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, twenty-six states now require schools to teach cursive again, up from fourteen a decade ago, after the standards dropped it in favor of keyboarding. Brain scans show that forming letters by hand sets off rhythms tied to memory that typing never touches, and the effect holds even when the child writes with a digital pen on a screen. So it is not paper against the screen. It is the hand against the keyboard. Why should the way a letter is made change what the mind keeps?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Because the letter is not the message. The making of it is. On a keyboard every letter is the same gesture. Press, press, press. The same motion for the A as for the W, and the hand learns nothing, for there is nothing in the motion to learn. In cursive each letter is a different act of the body, built and not selected, and the scanner finds the brain lighting in the parietal regions and falling into the theta rhythm, which is the rhythm of encoding, of laying a thing down in memory. The keyboard was sold to us as the liberation of the hand. That sameness of gesture which made it swift is the very thing that emptied it. What we mistook for the friction of writing was the writing.
Weigh the keyboard by what it does. It enhances speed and legibility, and lets any man produce clean text without a trace of himself in it. It makes obsolete the made letter, the hand's authorship of the word, and the rhythm by which the body once told the mind that something had happened worth keeping. It retrieves, strangely, the compositor at his case, picking letters one by one from a tray, a thing the pen had put out of work five centuries ago. And driven to its limit it reverses, for it produces a writer who does not remember what he has written, words that passed through his fingers and never entered his hand.
Let me be honest about the evidence, for a media scientist who overstates his instrument deserves no hearing. The studies are small, a dozen children and a dozen adults in the best of them. Cursive is slower than print, and one trial found no advantage in the quality of what was written. And the legislators who bring it back speak mostly of signing checks and reading the Constitution, not of theta rhythms, so let no one say the law was made by the neurologists. Yet the finding stands where it matters. Marshall McLuhan taught that the alphabet made a certain kind of man, and here the instruments refine him: not the alphabet alone, but the manner of its inscription. The hand was never carrying the letter to the page. The hand was carrying the letter to the mind.
Now mark what is remarkable, and take heart from it. A civilization dropped a technology of the hand because it looked old, and for fifteen years the loss was invisible, as every amputation is invisible to the one who suffers it. Then the instruments caught what had gone, and twenty-six states reached back for the pen. This is the thing I have been telling you these many columns, happening in the open: a people read the grammar of a medium, saw plainly what it had taken, and moved to restore the limb. The numbness lifted. That is not nostalgia and it is not a war upon the keyboard, which is a fine servant. It is a civilization recovering the power to see what its own tools are doing to it. Teach the child to make his letters. What the hand builds, the mind keeps.
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News Source: Nature, February 2, 2026. "How learning handwriting trains the brain: the science behind the cursive wars." New Jersey P.L. 2025, c.284, signed January 19, 2026.
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com