[throwanem]

I used to say the same, and then found myself surprised by how difficult it is to go back and read even my own old handwriting compared to how it is now, enough so that I feel I've done myself a favor by putting in the effort to improve it.

Like good headphones, it seems to be one of those things where you don't know what you're missing until you know what you're missing.

[ralphb]

That's interesting. Maybe I should work on improving my handwriting. For now I just really love the undo feature, and I specifically use when I look at something I wrote and think "I wont be able to read that in the future" :-)

[throwanem]

That's entirely fair! And I don't mean to sound as if, using a pen, I never find the need to just scratch something out and try again. But these days it's maybe once a page, where looking back to the first volume of my diary from back in 2018, it was more like once a line.

And in general, I find a real benefit in facility of writing to facility of thought - not falsely is it said that we think a little differently when writing vs. typing, and each kind of thinking is both valuable and not precisely replicable in the other medium. Being able to write neatly, at a speed approximating that at which I think, has made it a lot easier to fix thoughts in a form that allows me to work with them.

[xvector]

Were you brought up writing, and did you do most of your schoolwork writing? I think that might have an impact.

As kids today begin typing more than writing, I think the perspective of writing facilitating thought might change.

The implications for this are interesting long-term, as humanity's methods of thought entry change. In the future we likely will one day revert to machine-assisted oral entry.

[throwanem]

Quite the contrary, really. I actually started typing at age six, much earlier than most of my cohort, and used pen and paper mostly under protest as a child and especially a teenager. Years on MU*s in my teens and 20s, and probably on the order of a million words of prose expended in roleplaying, left me with no interest in paper save for the most evanescent of purposes.

So when I picked up that first Metropolitan and Amazon Basics notebook in 2018, it was more for the sake of it than anything, and with no real expectation of persevering - indeed, having surprised myself with the discovery that the medium really does make a difference has no small amount to do with why I've kept up the practice to the tune of around 1500 diary pages and several A5 books filled with work notes.

(While I'm singing the praises of the old ways, I suppose I should mention that a good hand, with a good pen, also doesn't hurt to use. When it doesn't take any force to clearly mark the paper, you can write pages at a time with barely a pause and never feel it in your wrist. Granted I do also have a writer's bump now, but I'm not a hand model, so that's not really a drawback!)