Learning by Hand

When was the last time you filled a page with your own handwriting? Perhaps it was a shopping list or a journal entry. For many of us, our screens and thumbs have replaced pen and paper. In English lecturer and Sweetland Writing Center instructor Angie Berkley’s upper-level writing classes, though, the analog takes center stage. 

In every course she teaches, Berkley asks her students to write low-stakes responses to prompts at least once a week—entirely by hand. “I started doing that so that I had a sample of their natural voice,” she says, as a prophylactic measure against generative AI use. She prepared the students, telling them that it would be physically draining to write by hand for a long period of time, and that they might struggle to keep going, especially if they felt like they had run out of things to say.

But the students surprised her: They relished the opportunity to write out their responses by hand. “It forced them to slow down,” she remembers. “They wouldn’t have felt that they had the time to do that kind of open-ended reflection.”

Because of her strong belief in the importance of using one’s hands to learn, Berkley taught a course called “Love a Book, Make a Book” for the English department last academic year, which she will offer again this fall. 

“It’s essentially about loving reading, and not necessarily for English class,” she explains. “It’s about reading for pleasure and how we can celebrate the books that we love through making things.” 

While the students wrote final essays, they also made what Berkley called “bookish creations”: zines, chapbooks, and the like. Herself a zinemaker, Berkley creates a book along with her students. Along the way, they all discover the joy of creating something with your hands. 

Seeking Inspiration without AI

On occasion, students will ask Berkley if they can use generative AI to give them ideas of what to create for the course. Berkley says no—for good reason. 
“The point is the process of making and how it feels,” she says. 

For inspiration on campus, Berkley has taken students to the Clements Library, U-M’s print and manuscript repository that focuses on the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her classes have also viewed more modern bookish creations that blur the lines between zines and artist’s books from the Hatcher Library’s Book Arts collection. Broadly, the students focus on commonplace books: personal notebooks popular during the early modern period and the 19th century which people used to compile quotations, poems, recipes, and prayers, among other things. 

Berkley urges her students to keep their own commonplace books and journals, if they don’t already. “Your handwriting is a mark of you,” she says. “When you’re copying some amazing quote that really speaks to you in your own handwriting, you are making it your own with your body and your mind.” 

Her hope is that they can turn to their own creations and compilations instead of ChatGPT and think, “I now have the experience of having the pleasure and frustration and all the wonderful human feelings that come with figuring it out myself.” 

Berkley continues to be reminded of the importance of writing and making by hand, even in her own creative practice. She recently made a zine whose text was solely handwritten. 

“I could really see my revision process in a way that I miss out on when I compose at the computer,” she says. “To be able to see it develop and slow down—it’s another way that this practice validates your own thinking and reminds you, ‘Look at what I can do with my brain!’”

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