‘I take pen in hand’

When I went to college a billion years ago, I stood out among my peers because I had a portable typewriter. Imagine! That was a defining piece of technology that few others owned, and it was the only time in my life that I was on a leading edge.

It was my high school graduation present, and it was pretty spiffy. No longer would I have to use correction fluid to cover mistakes. This typewriter had a cartridge ribbon that popped out and could be replaced by a correction cartridge. Pop out the ribbon. Pop in the correction tape. Wax on. Wax off. So fancy.

I typed papers for other students and earned a little cash, but when personal computing edged into our lives, I balked.

Don’t get me wrong. A word processor was wonderful for correcting mistakes (or even editing on the fly), but I never used the typewriter to WRITE, only to type. Yes, all sorts of writers composed on a typewriter, but I was not one of them.

Facing a black screen was worse than a blank page. There was a disconnect between my brain and the blinking cursor. I was used to writing in longhand and then typing several drafts. The act of writing and the act of typing were separate processes in my brain.

In time, of course, I got over that, but I sometimes wonder if I lost something valuable along the way. The act of forming letters with your hand while expressing thoughts is slower, to be sure, but it is also markedly different from using a keyboard with your 10 fingers, to say nothing of typing with just your thumbs.

In 2024, NPR ran a story, “Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning” and it made me cheer, but have I reverted to writing this column (or any column) by hand? No. No, I have not. More’s the pity, but here it is Monday evening, and there’s a Tuesday deadline. Efficiency wins yet again.

Still, I feel vindicated in my hypocrisy. A neuroscientist who was interviewed for the NPR segment called writing by hand an “embodied experience” and that phrase gets to the heart of what my gut has long suspected.

The connection between the brain and the fingers gripping a pen or pencil is a different relationship than the one between the brain and the fingers tapping on a keyboard where the letters are preformed and uniform in shape.

The NPR article claimed that “it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.” Pouring your heart onto the page is not just a metaphor. Pen in hand, you fire up various centers of your brain, and perform a complex set of operations that can elicit joy, fear or laughter in the reader. Your body and mind have created a relationship with the reader.

Literacy is power.

Literacy is a beautiful thing.

Literacy is endangered.

I endanger myself when I spend more time with Hulu than with Thomas Hardy, and I know it.

The pull of technology is alluring and strong, and it continues to separate us more from ourselves and perhaps, each other. We are not just on the brink of artificial intelligence (AI); it has arrived and colonized, and while it can be a useful tool, it can also disrupt creativity and mental growth. I see it take root in young minds.

Many of today’s students don’t read much, they shy away from reading “hard” i.e. classic literature, they don’t write very well, and they have anemic vocabularies. This isn’t AI’s fault, not yet, but AI can accelerate the slide.

AI can tell them what articles say without them having to read for themselves. It can write papers and create images. Yet here I am worrying about handwriting. Heck, AI is getting good at reading handwritten documents!

Writing by hand is perhaps a corollary for the slow-food movement. Take time. Take care. Pay attention. Be present. Taste. Savor. Immerse yourself. Aim for a full, rich experience.

But we all know how it goes. Sometimes we just eat cereal for dinner.

Joan Zwagerman is and is not a Luddite, and sometimes she even eats popcorn for dinner.