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Seven Quick Takes in Defense of Longhand: 7QT X Seriatim

Seven Quick Takes in Defense of Longhand: 7QT X Seriatim

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 4:13 pm by Scott Eric Alt

Seven Quick Takes in Defense of Longhand: 7QT X Seriatim 2017-03-09T16:13:42-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Charles Dickens in 1858 (George Herbert Watkins, public domain)

Computer crashes helped me to regain my normal and native sanity about how to write. A time there was, and ever a good time, when I wrote everything by hand and raged, raged against the dying of the light. I wrote every term paper in graduate school by hand, and by hand revised. It felt natural thus; and I retained a record of all my corrections.(Which I would promptly show to my students as an example of what revision is.) The visual does matter; and the startling impact of it is lost when comparing an early, clean draft with a later, clean draft. I still marvel at how the printer ever deciphered the handwriting, with all the elaborate corrections, of Charles Dickens. (Dickens never wrote a clean copy for the printer. Imagine that!)

I.

As for me, I did stop imagining that. I stopped not long after I switched to writing—and revising—entirely on the computer. I wanted the ease of revision that a word processor could achieve. I could shuffle paragraphs here and there without the need to draw—and later follow—elaborate boxes and arrows. I actually congratulated myself for such inexcusable sloppiness. It looked neater; it felt quicker: Thus I deluded myself.

But it is not, in fact, quicker or easier when you lose two hours’ work to a computer crash, or a freeze, or a power surge, and have to reconstruct those beautiful sentences (for they are beautiful, in the idealistic memory of forgotten words) cold. No matter how many times one justifies the risk by appealing to backups, and backups of backups, having a handwritten copy is the only real surety against e-Alexandria.

But what about fire? you say. Or theft? These never have happened. But a crash, a freeze, a power surge? I should have a penny.

II.

Computers, in my experience, distract from the writing more often than they aid. Even with the ease of revision and the speed of getting the words down, my attention wanders with an abandon that should be sedated.

Someone IMs me on Facebook.

The dashboard in WordPress does some crazy thing; or else I hit an erroneous key and my formatting is ruined beyond sane repair.

The computer dings and whistles. Or, it harasses me with the breathless message that an update is now available. Do I want to update now or be reminded again in five seconds?

What was I trying to write?

Thus these things distract my train from thinking and me from the task at hand: seeking the pith of an idea. No such distractions exist when writing longhand. I turn the computer off; I abandon Facebook to the four winds, I save my fights with WordPress for when the post is writ and the thinking thought.

III.

The vile Dell off, and pen in hand, I can focus on words to the exclusion of all else.

And it feels more like writing, to me, when I can have this tactile connection to a physical object. I can hold a pen. I can shake it, tap it onto the page or my head to dredge a thought, or bite it to mull. It feels more like I am writing when I can look at a page and scratch out a line and try a different set of words; and if that does not work, scratch out and try again. Or, I can write several options in the margin. I am, this way, physically connected to words; they are not out in the cyber-ether, but rather my hand gave them shape. I create with a little pressure of the whole hand, clasped.

IV.

In my print, or cursive, is personality. Look at any manuscript—George MacDonald or Charles Dickens, or Jane Austen, or Lewis Carroll—and you will see the physicality of the writer. How much would be lost to us if we no longer had those? How much, if Dickens looked like Austen looked like Carroll?

V.

Paper does not perish with anything like the speed of an e-file. If I did not have my original handwritten copies of all the term papers I wrote in graduate school, I would not be able to retrieve them from the floppy disks I stored them on. Blogs are ephemeral, as are backup files on a server, but my print and my page last. (As do real books.)

E-space is not superior to real space. We still have the original Declaration of Independence. And the Magna Carta. And Greek manuscripts of the Bible.

VI.

I do not claim that electronic technology does not serve a purpose. Surely it makes people’s writing available to a larger amount of people, at speed and at convenience.

But it cannot replace the process of writing simply because it is a convenient and beneficial form (in this age) for a finished product.

VII.

If you write, you may have a different view than I do, but I have found that my writing is in fact better when I write longhand. My style is more fluid, my sentences less abrupt, less choppy. Perhaps that is because my ability to experiment with sentence structure in the margins, and my physical connection to the words I write, and the fewer distractions, all increase my attentiveness to the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs. Perhaps I get lost more in the flow of words than I do when trenched in the divided multitasks of a computer.

Give me paper until my fingers fall off and my blood stops and all the world turns dark.

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Conversion Diary here.

***

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