Katherine Kelly, linked above, and I both chose to write a manual script. Katherine chose to write and reflect on a poem given to her by a student’s parent and I chose to write a historical fiction short story. I decided to do a story because I felt like it would be more linear (as we could not use the copy/paste function of a word processor) but perhaps doing a reflection may have been better as there are fewer expected elements compared to a story. Overall I enjoyed her reflection and her use of a memory box to remind her of the good she does in the world is a great coping mechanism for a difficult day. I have pictures and cards in my office for the same reason.
Katherine chose to write in pen, while I chose pencil. She also lamented the visibility of mistakes in manual writing. She scribbled words out while I used an eraser that left visible marks. I think she would have been hard pressed to find a manual writing method that did not leave some evidence of mistakes. Choosing pen also made her words easier to read than my pencil choice. Katherine has excellent penmanship, which may be due to her use of manual writing daily in her classroom. We both longed for the affordances of the word processor particularly for editing such as being able to move sentences around, spell check and word choices changes. Being able to write iteratively is important to Katherine and I and was not granted by the use of manual writing (except as Katherine mentions by a complete rewrite).