The daunting task of writing longhand and why you should do it

It's interesting that many of the comments here are from people who have the luxury of only typing, knowing that they won't forget how to actually write by hand. But not all languages have this luxury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

Anecdotally, I've observed that most (all?) native Chinese speakers I've seen have very clear and uniform (as in similar to that of others) handwriting, even in English. I noticed this especially when I was grading tests and had to read dozens and dozens of variations of the same answer written by different people. I wonder if it's because there's a lot more emphasis on learning writing by rote and on uniformity of certain strokes in the characters.

I'm thrilled to be an adult in the age of computers where i basically never have to write anything by hand ever.

My penmanship was always terrible, and this was magnified by being left-handed and being taught to write in a manner which drags my hand through recently written ink. Half my notes in hs and college were illegible. I'm envious of kids today taking notes on laptops or tablets.

If the founding fathers had word processors, the Constitution would be 1,000 pages long.

Handwriting forces concision and more careful thinking before committing ink to paper.

I compose longhand, and then type into a computer, which works as a very good compose->edit process for me. Longhand is for getting the idea out, and even though I can type faster than I write with a pen, my effective words per minute (without editing and rewriting) for composing ideas is faster longhand.

But that's just me. Different people have different preferences.

I type so much faster than I write by hand, that it’s actually detrimental since my writing falls too far behind my train of thought. Also have to concentrate more on writing vs. typing , which means in a note-taking context I also start losing stuff and not paying enough attention because I’m trying to catch up.

Also the distraction to rearrange paragraphs or look at word count sounds totally artificial - have the discipline to just plow through the typing and revise later, and for gods sake learn to use your word processor and turn off the damn word count function.

Which is to say - nice, cute article but - do what you’re faster and more effective at.

I have no experience in writing novels, but I do have quite a bit in being a student. I always cringe a bit at these purists thoughts of "you retain better when you write by hand" and "your creativity is better". The process of studying and learning is much, much more than just writing things down. Even if it was true that it's better to write by hand, the amount of productivity you lose by not having things in a digital format (weight, indexes, search, linking with other sources, corrections, drawings, etc) is just not worth it.

Not to mention that I think it's misguided to solve a problem by attacking it sideways. Writing by hand to fix excessive correction doesn't actually fix the issue, it just sweeps it under the rug. Maybe it's just delaying it until the point where the novel has to be reviewed and now they want to do the same corrections, but harder.

Bullshit. I tried writing longhand for years with different pens and techniques. It was always slow and uncomfortable. I'll never write longhand again if I can possibly avoid it.

Computers do seem to encourage constant revision of small snippets. It's the same with art. You'll see artists with their fingers on CTRL-Z and re-drawing each line a dozen times until they're happy, line by line. I'm guilty of that too. Yet, I also find that just finishing a whole piece first before revising it is more efficient, because you can put a higher focus on the bigger picture. Programming IDEs have the same problem, they keep distracting you away from the bigger picture to fix all your tiny little typos first, when you'll probably have deleted that code already by the time your code is really ready to test.

"I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness"

-Obama

I had calligraphy at school (France, late 70's) and always liked to write by hand.

I only type today and the only cases when I write are in the school booklet we have to communicate with the teachers and when I am at a whiteboard.

This said, I used to draw geometric figures when on calls (it helps me to concentrate), and now I juste write nuce nonsense calligraphy

"Citation needed" for most of the claims.

Nope. I'm left handed, and writing longhand hurts my hand after a while, more so if I try and make it legible.

This article touches on the link between memory and handwriting. There's a huge increase in retention of written things, something like 70% of what we write makes it into our long term recall memory, which blows my mind. No matter how pervasive computers become, we can never forget our physicality.

I often wrote my college essays by hand (pen/paper) first. It seemed a more “direct” way to write than typewriter. I’d often wind up with plenty of length once I’d type it up, too. (I’ve always been able to type about the speed I think, too, so this wasn’t a bandwidth thing.)