I normally type everything out instead of writing by hand. I found this task very difficult, because I rarely do it and find the process overall to be slow, laborious and inefficient. In terms of mistakes, you can clearly see the places where I just crossed words out that I didn’t want to use, instead of the more elegant solution of using whiteout (which I unfortunately did not have on hand). In hindsight, writing in pencil would have been a better choice so that I could more easily fix mistakes, but I felt it was too late to switch from pen after already being 1 page into the assignment. I decided to go with a more creative writing task, which helped to cut down on mistakes a bit because I had formed the main idea for the story in my head before writing it down. Since I had a mental roadmap, I was able to stay on track and cut down on major edits. The choice of media played a huge role on how I edited my work. When writing by hand, I tend to be slightly less stringent and more forgiving with sentence structure or word choice. However, when using a word processor with faster editing capabilities, I could take the time to create stronger sentences and improve my word choices.
I think that the most significant difference between writing by hand and using mechanized writing forms is the level of care and thoughtfulness that can be given to it. I believe that handwriting causes one to have to slow down and carefully plan out the main thrust of what you want to say before you begin in order to keep mistakes and restarts to a minimum. It requires the writer to have more fully-formed thoughts ready to put to paper, whereas with mechanized writing the author can more easily edit their writing and therefore can cycle through more ideas before settling on the final one. Personally, I prefer typing to handwriting because it allows me to write more quickly, to brainstorm and think through my writing ideas on the fly, as well as quickly change specific areas or elements of my writing without necessarily affecting the entire work.
I also hadn’t considered whiteout! I am usually not a big fan of it, as it seems like such a bother to use versus the speed at which you can delete on a computer.
It does make me think about typing – we all assume that ‘mechanized forms of writing’ implies typing with a computer, but other forms of mechanized writing could include typewriters, printing presses, image recognition, etc. Many of these forms of mechanized writing have similar editing limitations to writing by hand – specifically typewriters. They allowed people to write in a very readable, neat, and orderly fashion, but had the same editing limitations as writing by hand. While I certainly prefer typing on a computer to writing by hand, I wonder if I would prefer typewriting to writing by hand? It has been a very long time since I used a typewriter.
Hi Brian, thanks for sharing your assignment. I considered doing this one but my hand gets sore from typing all day then to switch to hand writing would kill me. As a primary teacher I rarely get the chance to hand write. My hand writing has morphed into just printing. When I write on the white board for fun, the students call it “fancy writing.” As for whiteout, I don’t even own it. I love that you wrote three pages. How did your hands feel after you wrote? Did you write it all at once?
Hi Tyler, thanks for the comment! Well, after 3 pages, i will admit that my hands did not feel great, because I did write it all in one shot. It has been a long, long time since i have wrote anything by hand longer than a quick note on student work or scrawling out something on a post-it note. I hear you on the printing as well, I teach elementary music so I do a lot of printing on the board during the school day. Even then though, I other pre-make my slides for the day so that the content is ready to project on the screen, or I type on-screen as I teach the content.
Hi Brian,
You made an interesting comment that ‘handwriting causes one to have to slow down and carefully plan.’ The students that I work with have challenge with written output. Usually, written output is a trigger that results in some type of exhibited behaviour. The students are able to slow down their thinking to handwrite, rather they get frustrated because they can’t write as fast as they think. In addition, they have avoided writing by hand in their schooling career that it’s painful for them to write over an extended period of time.
How long did it take for you to write out your story? Did you find the quality of your written output change over the course of time?
Thanks,
Shawn
Hi Shawn, thanks for the comment. It is interesting how your students (like most other students) have challenges with writing by hand. I see that all the time in my own classroom as well, and it makes sense, right? They are so used to the quick editing capabilities and convenience of the word processor, and they don’t really see the value in being able to slow their thinking when handwriting. It actually didn’t take me as long as I thought it was going to to write the story, mainly because I wasn’t totally making it up from scratch (had some elements of an older story). Interesting observation about the quality changing over the course of time, that definitely was a factor in this case as i wrote by hand. I was much happier with the first 2 pages than I was the last page!