Skip to content

In Defense of Handwriting

As a technical writer (and general tech dabbler and person-of-the-new-millenium), I do a lot of typing. There's a lot, a lot, to recommend typing and even voice capture, and they indisputably have their benefits - speed, neatness, ease of editing, compatibility with other invaluable applications... it's hard to even imagine a time before Track Changes and SharePoint and the like made it seamless to share what you're working on with others. (The auto-save feature alone... as a millenial, I unfortunately have access to the collective consciousness of the horror where the power goes out and you realize you haven't hit Save on your biology term paper since 3:00 and it's almost midnight and due tomorrow...!).

I've also recently typed a lot into LLM windows for ideating, brainstorming, and so on. I've experimented with AI for, among other things, project and trip planning, recipe tweaking, and even some creative writing (with admittedly mixed results). It has its uses, for sure, and I've been enjoying playing with it to discover my own groove. I certainly don't think it's going anywhere, at any rate.

All of that said, I've also been doing more handwriting lately, and actually turning away from typing and GPT for certain things. I'm still feeling it out, but my "handwriting preferred" modes tend to fall into two general flavors:

  • When I need to memorize or "bake in" content. I've prepared for a lot of tests and exams in my time, and have tried a lot of different tools for studying and reviewing material. In short, although LLMs are incredible tutors, they can't actually learn the material for me. It's unfortunately very easy to move a lot of words around on a screen without actually internalizing the content. To actually memorize or get concepts baked into my brain, to this day, nothing has worked better for me than writing study notes out by hand, and writing flash cards by hand to review. I'm also a big believer in the aesthetics of study, and there's something about having just the right pen (extra-fine point rollerball, please), a cute notebook, and bright, cheerful highlighters to help solidify a concept. Once I've got a grasp on the material, then it's time to open up ChatGPT and ask it to quiz me.

  • Related, when I need to process something. Journaling, venting, even to-do lists - I've experimented with typing these, and have justified it on the grounds of "if I just write it in a random notebook, how will I be able to find it later?" But this assumes that I even want to find anything later, which in my case I've come to realize is a flawed assumption. I've got piles of old journals in a box in my office which I haven't opened once, and honestly recoil at the thought of re-reading. More to the point, journaling, to me, isn't an exercise I do for posterity; it's a cobweb-clearing activity, a way to get messy, raw things out of my brain so I can go about the rest of my day (shout out to Julia Cameron!). In that respect, posterity is pressure, and the ease of editing typed documents actually works against me. I find myself self-editing, questioning, doubting, and not writing.

    • This also goes for early stages of creative writing as well - LLMs, for example, are fun for ideation and riffing, but (for me, anyway) fall short of getting actual (me-sounding) words on the page. I've experimented with describing a scene in detail and having ChatGPT produce a first draft, for example, thinking that it would help me get over "the terror of the blank page", but so far it's caused more headaches than it's mitigated - I end up frustrated that it sounds so wrong and get bogged down in trying to fix something that I didn't even write in the first place. So: messy first drafts when I'm just trying to get something, anything, on paper are still hand-written, and transcribed into type later when it's time to make more sense/edit.

The common factors between these modes seem to be that the writing is in some way ethereal or disposable (it's only for me; I don't intend to return to it once complete; I don't need to search it later). Content that I plan to share with others, that I plan to return to or refer to later, or that I want to save for posterity for some other reason, gets typed.

As more and more people experiment with AI tools for content creation, and learn their own personal approaches and best practices for learning and knowledge management, I suspect there will be a revival or rediscovery of the benefits of writing by hand. One can hope, anyway - it's one of those small pleasures, after all, and we could all surely use more of those. I haven't found a good substitute for the scritch of pen, the smell of good paper, etc., nor for the singular satisfaction of looking up and seeing an entire page filled top to bottom with your own handwriting. (Even if no one else can read it, as my friends remind me about my penmanship. Maybe especially if.)