Handwriting could “go the way of Latin and Greek” and be “lost within a generation”, a leading author has warned after news that a major exams board was set to trial digital exams at dozens of schools.

       Colm Toibin, famous for penning novels such as Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary, said that “it would be a huge loss if [handwriting] were to go”, and called learning to write an “an identity-forming business”.

       AQA, Britain’s largest exams board and the provider of three-fifths of all GCSE and A-levels in England, announced on Monday that it was trialling online exams for GCSE maths and English at 60 to 100 schools this summer.

       If successful, the programme would be rolled out across most subjects, although Colin Hughes, the chief executive of AQA, told The Times that the board would keep some written exams to protect handwriting from dying out.

       “I would be very reluctant to move to a situation where students could get through the whole system without ever actually having to show that they can write something down using a pen and paper,” he said.

       He also claimed that online exams would be much greener than shipping millions of exam papers around the country before collecting them all again in Milton Keynes to digitise them.

       Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Tobin suggested that opting for convenience could kill off handwriting and its esoteric charms.

       “If you began to say everything would be much more efficient on a laptop, [handwriting] would go eventually, it would within a generation, almost disappear,” he said, adding: “It goes the way of Latin and Greek.”

       He also lamented the loss of handwriting as a marker of identity, adding: “You would know when a letter came from someone, oh that’s from Auntie so-and-so, that’s her handwriting.”

       Asked about his own writing habits, Tobin said he wrote all his own novels in longhand form.

       “It sort of matters to me that I’m actually making the letters, that I can touch the paper, that I’m somehow more deeply involved,” he said.

       In contrast, recent research has found that much of the general public has almost no need for the scratch of pen against notepad, let alone extended longhand writing.

       A survey of 2,000 people last September found that one in 10 people had not put pen to paper in over a year, while a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds had never written a letter or kept a diary.

       The ability to write clearly is not directly linked to literacy, despite popular perceptions, although a 2014 study found improved recall from people who handwrote notes during lectures.

       The study’s author’s hypothesised that the slower nature of handwriting forces individuals to paraphrase and therefore mentally process spoken

       For all the author’s gloom, there are some signs that the public shares his affection for the personal nature of handwriting. In 2019, when the British Museum put on an exhibition on writing, it asked visitors how they expected to send a birthday card in 2069.

       The top answer: a handwritten card.