ACT Reading — Comparative Passages — Drill 2

HUMANITIES — COMPARATIVE PASSAGES: The following passages are adapted from two essays about handwriting and digital writing published in The Writing Teacher's Quarterly (©2022). PASSAGE A Something is lost when students stop writing by hand. The research on this is more consistent than education journalists tend to acknowledge: students who take notes longhand retain concepts more durably than those who type, largely because the physical constraint of handwriting forces a kind of real-time synthesis. You cannot transcribe everything, so you must decide what matters. That act of selection is itself a cognitive exercise. Beyond note-taking, the physical act of forming letters — especially in cursive — activates regions of the brain associated with language processing and memory encoding in ways that keyboard input does not. These are not nostalgic arguments. They are neurological ones. Eliminating handwriting instruction from schools is an experiment with literacy that we have not thought through carefully enough. PASSAGE B The handwriting debate tends to generate more heat than light, mostly because its advocates frame it as a contest between depth and efficiency, when the real question is simpler: what skills do students actually need? Handwriting is one tool. Keyboards are another. Both require practice; neither is inherently superior for every task. The studies showing retention advantages for handwriting are real but limited — they apply most clearly to lecture note-taking and do not transfer neatly to other writing contexts. Students who compose essays at a keyboard are not cognitively impoverished; they are using a different tool for a different task. The goal of writing instruction should be flexibility: students who can choose the right instrument for the job and use it well. Treating handwriting as irreplaceable risks making the same mistake as those who once declared that calculators would ruin mathematical thinking.