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Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

Writing papers in a word processor is a far different experience from writing papers on paper.

Okay, and? Hand written papers haven't been a thing in nearly 2 decades unless it was some form of punishment. Also, teachers don't want to have to context switch between reading each paper, adjusting to each student's handwriting

Handwritten essays are still widely used in testing environments (including those arguably most important to a student's future, AP tests).

You listed the one exception to the rule. Most AP tests (physics, math, econ, etc) don't have that. Even the SAT essay is gone. That one AP test the final stronghold for an obsolete medium

The ones you listed still have FRQs that require critical thinking. Econ is writing a paragraph and drawing a graph, as I recall, and Physics has a question where you have to reason out an experiment. And all of the history and english ones require long form writing.

Weird, I don't remember writing paragraphs for any of those tests. I took almost all the AP tests available, tho that was a decade ago. At most I labeled some axes and that was enough for perfect scores

> Okay, and?

You appear to be violently agreeing with me that there is a point to giving kids computers to use gdocs.

Thankfully. Handwriting caused me massive hand cramping until much later in life when I re-trained myself to hold a pen differently. A lot of my school essays were optimized for the fewest number of words that met the base requirements.

That in itself is a useful skill, but I don't recommend it as a coping mechanism to avoid physical pain.

Yeah, writing on a word processor is a million times better (at least it is for me).

Don't get me wrong, I do think it's bad that writing things by hand is becoming more and more rare all the time. In particular, handwritten letters and notes have an extra bit of "personal touch" to them that can make them very valuable to the recipient.

However, from the time I was in High School to today I would never want to be required to write a paper, well, strictly on paper (from the beginning). I want all of that ability to quickly edit at my fingertips.

As someone who has physical problems writing by hand, papers I wrote by hand in school where better. Being forced to slow down gave me mental time to edit before I committed to page, by the time my pencil made a mark I was already on the 2nd or 3rd revision of what I was going to write.

I also have physical problems writing by hand, and it led to me handing in a lot of unfinished essays after running out of time in exams. If I hadn't gotten a special dispensation to type my exams later on, I wouldn't really have anything to show for my education. Before my issues were diagnosed, my teachers and parents felt that it was due to a lack of effort on my part and that they could punish me into writing properly, and I feel that having access to Chromebooks is worth it if it even spares one kid from having to deal with that.

On a computer I can easily rewrite the same phrase 10 times, reorganize a sentence for the best sounding flow, move or remove whole paragraphs multiple times, until I am satisfied I have said what I wanted to say in the best way I know how.

I can save off any number of possibilities and compare them side by side.

Also, none of this prevents me from spending 30 minutes beforehand thinking about what I am about to write. Although, I will admit, even if I do that I am likely to have at least a text editor open to jot down a few notes as I think about it.

I do agree, however, that the up-front thinking is a very good idea.

My boss always loves it when I write the documentation for my code on a wide-ruled paper in cursive instead of in our Wiki system.

For me it's the lack of context switching that would get to me. I'm many years out of school (for now) but I do remember having a blank page in front of me as being somewhat inspiring. It was a new, fresh invitation to write something. Ctrl + N in a word processor just opens up a new window, and for whatever reason, doesn't carry that same weight of inspiration.

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