Forum / Losing longhand breaks link to the past

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Jul 06, 07:58am

  Some interesting thoughts on the mechanics of writing.

  (Full piece is here: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/06/25/andrew-coyne-losing-longhand-breaks-link-to-the-past/)

  "Text on a computer is infinitely corrigible: We commit to nothing, either in words or sentence structure. This frees us to make an incomprehensible mess of things. We sail out recklessly into a sentence with no idea of where we are headed, and get lost.

  Handwriting, to the contrary, forces us to make an investment. The words are there on the page; we can’t change them, except to scratch them out. It inclines us thus to compose the sentence in our heads first — and the sort of sentence you can compose and keep in your head is likely to be shorter and clearer than otherwise. Your readers will generally thank you."

  "How we write, in other words, affects what we write. You compose in a different way using pen and ink than you do on a computer. You think in a different way. It may even be that you are, to that extent, a different person, much as we take on a different personality when we speak a foreign language."
  .....
  (I wasn't aware that handwriting is becoming 'optional' in US schools...gulp.)

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Jul 06, 01:35pm

  I agree with a lot of what's here. I really like "text on a computer is infinitely corrigible."

  "We sail out recklessly into a sentence with no idea of where we are headed, and get lost" is a bit dramatic, to say the least. The experienced, controlled writer wouldn't make such mistakes consistently, or otherwise would consider it part of her process of discovery--a sort of literal stream of consciousness.

  The flagrant use of "we" also strikes me as a bit narcissistic, like "obviously everyone thinks the same way I do." I do most of my composing on the computer, and do believe it makes more work for me when I print out drafts for revision. I'll catch myself having wandered pretty far off track of sense and syntax, though that's getting more rare.

  I also tend to start off by handwriting, sometimes just to get into that flow of forming sentences in my head faster than or as quickly as I can write them down. Just like in regular business, to blame technology for shortfalls in quality is to overlook the responsible sentient being. In other words, it's an excuse...

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Jul 06, 01:36pm

  Coyne is absolutely right, though, that penmanship is a dead art.

• 
  Michael Gillan Maxwell

  Jul 06, 09:30pm

  I've been thinking about this lately as well. I can only hope that the scars on my knuckles inflicted by the Sisters of Eternal Guilt and Suffering during penmanship lessons will not have been in vain.

• 
  Elizabeth Kate Switaj

  Jul 06, 11:33pm

  I wonder if people said the same thing when we stopped writing on clay tablets. Paper burns. Digital data is notoriously difficult to erase entirely.

  I wish I hadn't been required to learn cursive in school because with my poor fine motor skills, it was torture. If I have to write, printing is perfectly serviceable (and more legible). Even having learned cursive, it can be a struggle to read the secretary hand of archival materials read a century ago (especially, if like me, the person who wrote the materials struggled with handwriting).

• 
  Joani Reese

  Jul 07, 01:51am

  About a decade ago, I bought a copy of a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts, including the annotations of Ezra Pound and Eliot's wife Vivienne, of T.S. Eliot's THE WASTELAND. The diacritical marks and marginalia is fascinating and made interesting and enlightening critical discourse for many scholars for years. We lose something by gaining the ease of computer generated text. In years to come, annotations and marginalia may very well be a thing of the past. It is fascinating to me to see how a work of art comes about through the act of craft. Computer creation makes it too easy to simply delete everything we don't find possible or likable. This is a loss in many cases. It's not as though I imagine my work will be read or studied, but there are some canonical or potentially canonical writers out there whose beginnings and thought processes we will never be able to study on paper the way we can with many deceased writers who composed during the age of paper and pen. The epic of Gilgamesh was inscribed in cuneiform on clay tables in approximately 2500 BCE, and these tablets were discovered in relatively good condition in a cave in the nineteenth century. Clay, it seems, has a rather longer shelf life than a computer.

• 
  Sam Rasnake

  Jul 07, 04:27am

  "Computer creation makes it too easy to simply delete everything we don't find possible or likable. This is a loss in many cases."

  Absolutely agree, Joani.

  After reading Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, I realize that if Bishop had used a computer, One Art would not exist in its present form. Also, reading Bishop's Letters shows, over nearly two decades, the transformation of a bus ride to the finished poem "The Moose". If e-mail - instead of postal letters - had been Bishop's method, that poem would not exist.

  If Eliot had used a computer - no Waste Land. And Hart Crane, no Bridge.

  I could go on, but it's too depressing a thought.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 07, 04:43am

  I agree with all the relevant stuff said above (and even learned the meaning of "corrigible" without the preceding "in-" so thanks for that).

  I find it extraordinarily sad to see this come to pass. To write by hand is to *draw* your soul's intent. I think it is essential for children, esp., to be able draw/create/ their letters and words (kitty-cat faces for dotting-the-"I" included) and take pride in the full artistic/self-beauty of what they've created.

  Think of the parents of the near-future who will not have handwritten/mis-spelled birthday/Valentine's/Mother's-Father's Day Cards to tape to the fridge with all the open spaces filled with drawings of cats n' dogs n' flowers n' stars and them and child holding hands and floating in the air above the house.

  "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" would never have occurred without the hand-printing of letters by a child.

  It's just a damn shame.

  For the adult who writes by hand, I believe what is written is affected by the quality of pen, ink, paper, light-source, the writing surface on which the paper is placed, the suffusing knowledge that you have created something physical in a physical world that must be protected because It is the ONLY It there is in the entire universe.

  There is no immediate "back-up."

  It IS an investment of time, energy, materials-paid-for and INTENT. There is something at risk in the act, above and beyond Thought or (yuck) "expressing yourself."

  Therefore you tend to think before acting.

  Same with composing on a typewriter (esp. manual).

  When it's time for the next sentence you must stop, sink, dissolve/disappear into the matter-at-hand before committing your thoughts to paper.

  Because it's a pain in the ass to have to retype an entire page (or pages, if you have to re-paginate the work).

  You're responsible, INVESTED, I think, more so than knowing you can go back/change/fix anything later so why not just let it flow.

  There's an awareness of the benefits of getting it right the first time.

  And a typewriter makes noise.

  If the person you're with doesn't like THAT NOISE you know you're with the wrong person.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  That being said, I can no longer write with a stick.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 07, 04:56am

  " If e-mail - instead of postal letters - "

  The implications of that are SO TRUE.

  Think of all the volumes of "Collected Letters of So n' So and Him n' Him"

  that simply will not exist in the future because of all correspondence these days being performed/deleted via email.

  Think of all the letters (which will no longer exist) that includes drawings/marginalia/scribbles/doodles/personal notes ("Must take shoes to cobbler!")dates,

  et cetera
  et cetera
  et cetera

  Think of all the song lyrics written on envelopes being auctioned off--no more!

  No smudgy paper trail, no scribbled proof of man!

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 07, 05:19am

  Hand-written letters from lovers

  (to be studied, sniffed, FELT,
  turned-over, opened/put-away/
  re-opened...obsessing over the quality
  of paper/envelope/choice-of-stamp,
  implications of writing-style (impatient,
  brusque, languorous, teasing, serious, unserious, promising, unpromising..?)
  Focusing on her formation of the letter "a"...
  What does that mean when she forms her letter "a" like that...)

  All gone.

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Jul 07, 06:31am

  Yeah, this all got me thinking.

  Our handwriting is so much a part of who we are. I met my birth mother in my 20's and, before ever laying eyes on her, received a letter in the mail (which I still have). Reading it, studying the way she shaped her letters, I remember thinking I could have written it myself. It was the first time I'd internalized that I was truly genetically connected to this stranger, linked by a common style of forming certain letters and linking them with a certain flair. And it was all very much a part of the process. Had she sent an e-mail, that would have been lost.

  When my kids were born, I began a journal wherein I write them each a letter yearly on their birthdays, the journal to be given them in future years. I'd been toying with the idea of writing/printing the letters from the computer as it would be easier. After reading all of these observations and giving this all some thought, I will carry on the handwritten tradition. A typed letter could have been written by anyone. Giving them handwritten letters is giving them something that could only come from me.

  I am, however, still reeling from the news that schools are making handwriting optional. I'm in denial. I refuse to believe it!

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 07, 08:27am

  "I will carry on the handwritten tradition. A typed letter could have been written by anyone. Giving them handwritten letters is giving them something that could only come from me."

  Good for you, and them (and the human race).

• 
  Gone

  Jul 07, 10:36am

  And then, with the advance of audio-visual technology, the increasing bandwidth of electronic communication... with the compacting of millions of bytes of data into little bursts of light that travel over wires made of glass or radiate throughout the world from dinky little antennas and thousands of sattelites, soon, even text will be superfluous.

  But imagine an entire generation unable to compose a grocery list. The poor devils will starve.

• 
  Gone

  Jul 07, 10:37am

  satellites....

• 
  Gone

  Jul 07, 01:45pm

  Let's see. What did we have before writing came along? People had to remember everything, long, bardic sagas, chronologies, geneologies... it gave them tremendous brain power beyond the skill sets of flint-chipping for blades and axes. Made them smart enough to invent writing. Oh, how the bards complained it was the end of art as they knew it, if not the end of all things brave and wonderful. The bards complained and the scribes snickered. Scribbled and snickered while life went on.

  Now... if we stop using text after all these millenia, maybe we'll have to get smart enough to remember things again and, this time, learn to stop killing each other over whose god is better or whatever it is we're killing each other over now.

  Maybe we'll...

  Maybe...

  Maybe...
  .
  .
  .
  (nah!)

• Frankie Saxx

  Jul 07, 03:28pm

  Kids these days don't even know what cuniform is.

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Jul 07, 07:47pm

  Kids.

  Sheesh.

  They don't recognize a good logosyllabic syllabogram when they see one!

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Jul 07, 10:13pm

  I may not be eligible anymore to comment because I largely stopped writing anything by hand, long hand or keyboard, because I contracted a serious case of tendinitis — from one day to the next I could hardly use my fingers without pain. I researched voice recognition software and switched from writing to speaking, from keyboard/pen to voice. It's taken me two months to entirely trust my voice and probably another two months to really feel comfortable dictating into a recorder (for later transcription) or directly into the editor (which is what I'm doing now). Accuracy is almost 100% (in his entire text I had to manually correct one word). It's perhaps too early to say what the impact on my writing will be but I can already say that it feels as if my "writing" has acquired more of my own "voice". The other thing is speed: since I dictate I write 2000 words with ease every morning in less than an hour (which means it's about four times as fast as keyboard composition). When Sartre's eyesight gave in, he refused to switch to dictation because as he said he needed to see the context— I understand this: dictating, in this respect a little like writing in longhand is a more linear activity than typing in an editor with the ability of changing anything anywhere on an infinite page. Henry James was forced to take up dictation in his late 40s (also because of tendinitis) and he seemed to think that his writing benefited from that (the great Canon of well-known James novels was created this way).

  Recently I've been able to write a little more by hand and it's been wonderful to do that again: I've always loved calligraphy, but the very thought of having to return to either typing or writing everything in longhand is horrid to me. I will let you know what happens should I lose my voice.

  The article was too whiny for my taste. My daughter is 12 and attends a Waldorf school where calligraphy, the arts and doing anything with your hands is highly valued and preferred. Nevertheless I cannot help noticing how screens and especially touch screens invade her consciousness, which seems so altered that I have a hard time comparing my experience and others. The two cultures, digital and nondigital, seemed to drift apart more quickly, much more quickly than even generations. I'm not sure I know what the best response to such a culture gap below are very feet is, but I'm personally uncomfortable discarding one world experience (that I do not fully understand) in favor of another.

• Frankie Saxx

  Jul 08, 09:09am

  Marcus, I recently discovered Google voice search on my phone, which some enterprising app developers have co-opted as an input method (I installed the Hacker's Keyboard app, which has a little microphone and lets me dictate into text fields, and also the word processing app on my phone. I don't remember seeing the option on my phone's default keyboard.) Unfortunately my Android is one revision too old to run the dictation without being online.

  I'm impressed with the accuracy. Out of the box, probably around 98% or better for me. And some of the words it doesn't get surprise me. (And some do. I expected to have to manually correct "Cryptonomicon.") I remember messing around with IBM's Via Voice and the CMU Sphinx project some ears ago, but neither was effortless.

  It took me a surprising short time to go from feeling self conscious to prefer talking to my Twitter. I only do it when I'm alone though. Something feels rude about speaking to a digital device when there are other humans present.

  My main thought on reading that was wondering whether Andrew Coyne also laments the loss of creativity that must come from playing the piano, rather than, say, the harp, since hitting keys is just "file retrieval."

• 
  Chris Okum

  Jul 09, 10:07pm

  I haven't written a story in longhand in years. Not nostalgic for it at all. Everything I write goes straight from my head to the computer. I don't like the way my handwriting looks. It's ugly. The less I see of it the better. Plus I don't get handcramps when I type. I love typing. I love the sound it makes. I love the way clean text look on a clean white background. My keyboard is old and makes a clackety-clack sound just like a typewriter. The only problem with writing on a keyboard is that sometimes I accidentally hit a combination of keys and everything I have been working on is erased in a split second. That happened to me six years ago. I was revising a very short novel I was working on and I don't know what happened or how I did it, but the entire novel was deleted and I was never able to find it, not ever again, not even with the help of some very professional tech guys. The moment I realized what I had done, the severity of it, I called my wife, who was at an Easter Egg hunt with our kids, and I cried. I didn't think she would understand why I was crying, but she did. She was very compassionate about my lost novel. A few weeks later I rented the Lodge Kerrigan movie KEANE, about a man searching for his missing daughter, and I cried again. This time my wife told me to reign it in a little bit. But I still miss that novel of mine. I hope it's out there, somewhere in cyberspace, safe and ready, one day, to come home to daddy.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 09, 11:07pm

  Did you take the cpu to a tech guy? Do you still have it?

• 
  Chris Okum

  Jul 09, 11:38pm

  Took the cpu to some tech guys. A year later my daughter spilled an entire cup of steaming hot coffee (not hers) onto the computer and effectively put it out of it's misery.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 09, 11:42pm

  Well, take it as a sign...

  *sigh*

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Jul 10, 05:50am

  I always print my drafts and edit longhand. Sometimes I'll encounter an utterly nonsense sentence or a small chunk of them and I think, "well, I hope you had fun here." Then I cut its (their) throat(s).

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 10, 06:19am

  Take it step further, Matt (et alia).

  Once you get a group together--set 'em up (two columns--don't worry about pagination--chop n' staple) as books.

  THEN

  when you have it in your hands, sit on the back porch/front porch/bed with a pencil in yer hand.

  It's AMAZING what you find.

• Frankie Saxx

  Jul 10, 10:59am

  I print as epub & put it on my reader, and use the notes function to mark changes. I always feel bad when I waste paper, the same way I feel bad about Christmas trees.

• 
  J.A. Pak

  Jul 11, 12:42am

  I feel the same way as Frankie. I hate wasting paper. It's true that writing something out with pen and paper is a different experience; sometimes when I'm stuck on a passage, I'll start transcribing it from computer to paper—the writing out by hand slows my mind and lets in other thoughts; sometimes I'll just linger on a word, almost as if I'm doing calligraphy. It frees the brain to come up with its own solutions.

  But...overall, I love writing on the computer. My handwriting can never keep up with my thoughts when I'm really writing. As a result, my handwriting becomes a complete mess and I won't be able to decipher later (even my shopping lists become cuneiform). I love editing on the computer even more. I used to literally cut and paste and staple. And god, typing a clean copy was impossible.

  As for annotations and marginalia, most word processing software like Microsoft Word have provisions for all that. Scrivener even lets you take "snapshots" of text before you work on them.

  I also like typing. I play the piano so have an aesthetic connection to moving my fingers. I think it helps with the writing.

• 
  Gone

  Jul 11, 02:51am

  I really feel bad about all those Sumerian scribes. All that work and nobody reads it. The really sad thing is that... what I feel? It's empathy.

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Jul 11, 05:57am

  This is Be Kind to Sumerian scribes Week.

  So empathy is appropriate.

  You can go back to being indifferent next week.

• 
  Sally Houtman

  Jul 11, 06:16am

  Modern Note Taking -

  http://edudemic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/note-taking.jpg

• Frankie Saxx

  Jul 11, 08:36am

  @JA

  "I also like typing. I play the piano so have an aesthetic connection to moving my fingers. I think it helps with the writing."

  Yes! I played for some years, into my teens, and I feel... don't know. More creative? When I'm typing. All that advice about long walks and staring into space and creativity does not help me at all. The creating happens while fingers are moving (typing).

  It's rare I think about things I'm writing when I'm away from a keyboard. Though I did start doing this exercise in a book Marcus recommended where you internally describe things to yourself when you observe them. I don't know if it's had much impact on my writing, but it seems to make memories of the places and things I've observed that way more vivid.

• Frankie Saxx

  Jul 11, 08:41am

  @sally:

  I take notes like that. Also record directions in foreign cities. Take pictures of intersections with visible street signs. Back when I had a dumb phone.

  Was handy in China. Take a picture of an address or a building, or important words like "vegetarian" so I could show them to people on my camera or visually compare the characters when looking at a menu or street signs.

  It's an interesting experience, operating illiterate. Not one I'd care to live with day to day, for sure.

• 
  J.A. Pak

  Jul 11, 06:18pm

  Frankie, I often get story ideas while playing the piano. I'm sure our brains have been rewired: Finger Moving = Creativity. :) Also doing really mundane things like washing the dishes gets my creativity going. I think it goes back to what someone said about boredom being the best thing for creativity. Oh—I think that was Neil Gaiman?

• Frankie Saxx

  Jul 12, 07:49am

  It's hard for me to get good and bored these days. There's always a backlog of tv/internet/books/projects.

• 
  mxi wodd

  Jul 13, 09:59pm

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

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