For my analog experience I decided to write this week’s blog post longhand. Being as that the experience has literally just begun, and thus I have nothing to report yet, it seems that the only way to overcome this paradox is to say what I’ve just said. See, now I have like two sentences. Three. Four. Ha. I’ve already made some observations. First, my handwriting sucks unless I focus on making it neat: I think it’s just a matter of being accustomed to proceeding quickly through a sentence when typing; plus I suppose I just don’t write by hand often enough to have become well practiced at maintaining consistent legibility. Second, I am noticing that flow is indeed easier, though I’m not sure why: perhaps having actually transcribed the words has left them more pronounced in my working memory, and thus what follows is better able to derive itself from that which came before it.

Editing is a little more difficult, especially since I’m using pen and can’t erase; however, having to cross things out of and interject things into sentences has left me with a better picture of the evolution of what I’ve written. If I were typing instead, my words would always look as if that was how they had always been, and I would have no real record of any changes I made unless I specifically remembered them.

I feel that the enhanced flow is compensating somewhat for my tendency to jump around while I write. Also, sometimes I want to quickly transcribe starting points of several thoughts: this is very easy on a computer, as I can just type quick fragments wherever and then expand and arrange them later; but, at the same time, this paragraph that I am currently writing was (ironically) expected by me to be an example of this fragmentation, but here I am a minute later and what I suspected would come out as fragments that I would need to figure out how to manipulate on the paper medium has cohered into a paragraph requiring nothing of the sort.

My hand is getting a little tired.

This is such a weird, self-perpetuating blog post. I was expecting to have a lot more difficulty. I was also expecting my spelling to suffer a little bit, but I guess I’m less reliant on spell check than I thought; though I feel like writing this by hand has evoked a less formal vocabulary than I would use if I was typing.

I’m not going to abandon the digital word processor, but I definitely intend to explore ways to incorporate longhand into my writing: perhaps hand-writing small segments of something to be later integrated into an evolving digital document. We shall see. I definitely prefer to look at what I’ve written through the aesthetically superior lens of a type font, though, so I don’t think I’ll change my ways too much.

Lastly, dealing with a physical piece of paper really conveyed the feeling of creating something more than pixels on a screen typically does; though the printed version of something I typed may find greater favor with me than something I wrote longhand.

All in all this was a fun an interesting experience.