How hard is it to learn to write by hand as an adult?

Doctors have warned that overuse of electronic screens is leaving some children unable to hold a pen properly. But while learning as an adult is difficult, it's not impossible

This week, paediatric occupational therapists warned that children were entering primary school not knowing how to hold pens and pencils, owing to an overuse of technology instead of activities that build muscles in the hands and teach control of movement, such as using building blocks. But what if you make it to adulthood without knowing how to hold a pen? Can you learn then? "You can, but the brain of a very young child is so plastic that it just absorbs information quite well," says Angela Webb, recently retired clinical psychologist and the chair of the National Handwriting Association. "After age 11, you can learn things - but you have to really want to, you have to be motivated, you have to practise. The ideal position is if you learn in early childhood and then you have a skill for life."

There was a time, she says, when people didn't believe handwriting was going to survive the digital age, "so they stopped teaching handwriting in schools. You have a generation of young adults [in their 20s and 30s] who weren't taught at school and had to find their own way."