Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain
nealstephenson.substack.com
nealstephenson.substack.com
I think that at this point, the idea becomes just a gatekeeping.
I have been writing notes in notebooks by my hand for years. But gradually I switched to typing notes in a notepad or drawing with a stylus on a gadget - and I don't notice any real difference.
> I am left handed. … When I was a child, writing at length with pencil, the side of my hand sometimes became gray from graphite picked up as my hand rubbed across the page.
Writing with pencil is fine. I prefer it, and its variations in line weight can be quite attractive. Moreover, it can be done without pressing hard and causing cramps: either accept a lighter line weight or use darker graphite.
I agree with you about the gatekeeping. Handwriting is simple but the Internet has fetishized it. Just write a lot: in a notebook, on index cards, on scraps, wherever. And don't think twice about it: in my experience, most of the time what's written has little if any long-term importance and its greatest virtue is rather to trigger the aware mind to release the idea for the mind's more-mysterious parts to then process, combine, and assimilate effortlessly in the background.
> Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing is super easy to edit. Writing by hand is hard to modify, it forces the brain to think about the entirety of what you want to write about and organize all the thoughts and sentences in your brain first. Think about writing code on a piece of paper vs typing.
I am will punch a baby squirrel if I ever have to hand-craft another login or contact form. I've done it with 20 different languages and frameworks. I am out.