To me, this is a very interesting task because of both my own history with writing and my work with people who could not write with what we might call the older mechanisms of writing. At the moment, I am not able to write more than around twenty words by hand without experiencing great pain and having my hand swell for a few days. Some years ago, while playing soccer, I was kicked in the hand, got a screw put in it and, though I expected it to return to normal, and was told it would, it never has. Our discussion of the mechanizing of writing has focused, quite reasonably, on the way moving from scroll to page, and later to the printing of books using movable type, impacted the information available to society. As our task, among other things, shows, however, the individual’s writing is also shaped by the tools which are used to do it. Even before my injury, I never found real pleasure in writing by hand. I did write, and did correct my writing by crossing out, erasing, and so on, but I never really enjoyed it, the words never really flowed, if I may put it that way. Once I was injured, I spent more than a year only writing during university exams, and found that the quality of my writing, and those exams, was far worse than the writing produced as I wrote essays on the computer. I began to understand the value students I had trained, who were transitioning from writing braille through embossing to writing the same text virtually on computers, placed on easy correction and jotting. I had taken these things for granted before, but saw their great value, whether writing in a mechanized way or not, when they became laborious. I saw that value again when I finally asked to switch to typing for all my university work, the quality of the work went up while the effort went down. Having said that, there is a kind of immediacy in writing by hand which I still see and which no mechanized form has really been able to provide. This must be a great draw for people who take pleasure in writing but, even for me, I miss it somewhat. It is not something, I have found, which can really be replicated with any form of typing, whether on a physical or virtual keyboard. Having said that, the loss of that immediacy is outweighed by the gain, for me, of being able to write without the difficulty and effort of writing by hand. Though I prefer the newer methods, I understand many peoples’ preference for doing their writing, particularly writing which requires thought or has a great deal of personal content, in the older and more tangible way.