In the modern age, the question, Do you normally write by hand or type?, doesn’t make sense because the answer is it depends on what the purpose of the writing is and who it is for. Whether I choose to hand write type is determined by how much time I want to spend communicating my ideas and whether I want to also convey sentiment. If the goal is to communicate ideas, then writing by hand does not make any sense in the modern world. Why would I want to communicate at 13 words per min when I can do so at 55 words per min? Why would I want to shackle myself to the permanence of ink on paper when I can choose a medium that allows for infinite revisions while producing a polished product? (Looking at my diary entry, I already wish I had typed it first. I wanted to also mention how career excellence is impossible with a child. How am I supposed to be efficient and prep high quality lessons when I have to go home right after work for childcare? Women who place career over their children are also ostracized by society). Writing by hand, because it takes so long and requires so much planning to produce polished work, is reserved for the most special recipients, those who are truly worth our time, and occasions; it is only done on heartfelt messages like love letters and thank you notes.

I have perfectionist tendencies so when I make mistakes when writing, I use whiteout tape, which is superior to liquid whiteout because it is ready to write on right after its application and it provides clean, straight lines for the correction. Of course, I only use this corrective method on white paper. On coloured paper, as I learned from my grandfather when I was a child, it is much better to wet an eraser and rub the top layer of the paper off, much like how the monks used a knife to scratch off some parchment to correct their errors (Harris, 2018). Crossing something out looks messy and draws attention, and it leaves evidence of the specific blunder, which may say something about my intellect! On pieces of great importance, I may decide to start over.

Much like how early scientists reveled at how a paper can be revised and reprinted when new discoveries are made and old mistakes fixed (Harris, 2018), thoughts can be revised multiple times until their permanent placement on paper. The early scientists experienced revisions on a time scale of months and years, made possible by the printing press (Harris, 2018), and we experience it now in real time when we write with a computer. This is the most significant benefit of mechanized writing, more significant than time savings and professional appearance, because the main purpose of writing is to communicate; the ability to revise serves to better that purpose. I prefer to type over to write. When I choose to write because the message is personal, I actually type it first, so that my piece of writing has that final, professional and clean look.

We may be on the precipice of another communication remediation, one that perhaps cycles back to an oral medium. With instant communication devices causing future generations to become less patient and to always want instant gratification, 55 words per minute is beginning to feel too slow as well. Voice-to-text programs will only become more sophisticated over time and may replace typing with 150 spoken words per minute. Indeed while I was writing this diary entry, I was constantly annoyed that my hand couldn’t catch up to my thoughts, and then my hand started cramping so my letters became sloppy. When one medium is replaced with a superior one, remnants of the old medium remain (Bolter, 2001). The oral medium did not have punctuation as these were communicated with tone, volume, and rhythm. The written medium invented punctuation to retain these oral features. And now, in voice-to-text programs, we have to say “period” and “comma” to retain punctuation in writing. What a 360 we have done!

References

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2^nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harris, Brad. “The Printed Book: Opening the Floodgates to Knowledge.” How it Began: A History of the Modern World. 15 Feb. 2018. https://howitbegan.com/episodes/

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I thought I would give this activity a go just for fun because I love arts and crafts. Each potato took me 11 min to carve. The most challenging thing to carve was the hole in the “a” as I only had a flat paring knife. The first stamp did not have enough paint on it, so for the second, I used more and moved the potato around to really smear the paint into it. I chose “haiku” because I like writing them. They are so much fun! Sometimes, I answer students’ emails with a haiku for a laugh.

In hindsight, it would be a lot easier to carve out the letters as a negative space because you can then just dig with any tool. The hole floor does not have to be even, it just has to be lower than the rest of the potato. The printing press obviously did not do this though as this sort of printing would not be ink efficient. In any case, because the letters in the printing press were created by filling molds with metal, the molds themselves were created in just this way, digging out a hole for the letter, but the hole bottom would have had to be perfectly smooth so that the finished letter would receive a uniform layer of ink.

Letters have a distinct proportion, as we all learned in grade school when our papers had three lines to guide our printing: a solid, a dashed line in the middle, and a solid line at the bottom. I appreciated the memory as these three lines were the first that I carved into the potato. I suppose letters all follow this proportion because visually, this makes them easier to recognize and analyze.