Many of these EWD notes are hand written with a lot of mathematical notation,
and no corrections. For example:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1063.PDF
I am reminded of Salieri's reaction to Mozart's manuscripts in the movie Amadeus.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1063.PDF
I am reminded of Salieri's reaction to Mozart's manuscripts in the movie Amadeus.
There of course could have been 100 corrections. He just threw those papers out and started again. Which is what we old timers did when we wrote things that we wanted to look nice. I did this with every math assignment at uni: do the work, get it right, then hand-copy a legible version to hand in.
But your point about doing 1300 of these is well-taken.
(For what it's worth, this would be easier with a fountain pen because a big selling point of them is they fly over the paper so easily compared to a ballpoint pen. I switched to a fountain pen, and I had to un-learn how hard to grip the pen and press on the page.)
Not to undersell things, but doing this for hundreds of pages is what everyone did before 1868, when the typewriter was invented. I think perhaps it's less about the physical act of doing it and more about the mental act of deciding to do it over and over again.