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by bjackman 33 days ago
Well, how many times in that 9 years have you written on paper for 2 hours straight? Even as a kid who did it regularly, it sucked.

Doing it now I really don't think I could deliver my intellectual best while worrying about if anyone can read my handwriting and whether I'm gonna cramp up by the end of the exam.

Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.

2 comments

> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text.

Pen and paper are literally designed to produce text.

Horse carts are literally designed to transport people but they aren't very good at it compared to cars
> Pen and paper is just not a very good way to produce text

Can you say more? It's worked well for 4,500 years. Probably the most important invention ever.

Well to be fair humans had to suffer through all kinds of miserable practices over those years. Modern style of writing as we understand it didn’t really develop until the 800s or so (if not way later).

So it’s like saying that clay tablets worked just fine for 1000+ years why would we switch to papyrus? Or who needs character for vowels? Or spaces between words, it’s not like anyone reads texts silently?

No? Some subsets of the world has papyrus I guess but for most people during most of that time people were pressing text into clay and wax and stuff, it must have fucking sucked.

Then we got paper and pens and that was a pretty decent interim for a short period. Then about 100 years ago we got typing. Then about 20 years ago we reached a world where almost everyone is better at typing than they are at writing.

Obviously it's still important that people can write by hand, but expecting people to do it for more than a few hundred words at a time is idiotic. Would you like your clothes to be hand sewn too? That also worked for thousands of years (much longer than writing) but we stopped doing it for a very good reason.