Month: September 2025

Here are two samples of my handwriting in English and Persian.

I usually, or perhaps I should say most of the time now, type instead of writing by hand. Especially after immigrating, my habit of using a pen has become very rare. I notice this most clearly in my personal diary. Nowadays, handwriting has become difficult for me. Holding a pen and moving it across the paper feels strange and tiring. I also find that I can no longer form letters as beautifully as before. If you look at a page from my diary (Persian one), you will see how my handwriting has lost its neatness and flow. Even though I do not type with the full ten finger method, I still rely on typing almost every day. My typing is not professional, but it works. I am forced to depend on typing because almost everything I need to prepare for assignments, proposals, or documents to be sent, must be submitted in Word or PDF format. Because of this, typing has become the natural and mandatory choice for me, while handwriting has become more of a rare, nostalgic practice.

When I write my diary, if I make a small mistake, I usually just ignore it and continue writing. But if the mistake changes the meaning of sentence, I have no choice but to correct it. I cannot erase the word. Instead, I cross it out with a line and write the correct word above or below it. Editing by hand is therefore more manual and visible, and the corrections themselves become part of the page (Clement, 1997).

When I type, the process is very different. I use Word software that has autocorrect and spell-check features. This can be very helpful. However, it can sometimes create new mistakes. For example, if I am not careful, the autocorrect feature may change a word into something completely different, with a different meaning (Lekamge & Smith, 2025).

Because of this, I think the medium plays a very important role in how I edit my work. With handwriting, I am responsible for finding and correcting every mistake myself, and my corrections stay visible on the page. With typing, the computer helps me, but it also sometimes makes errors that I must fix. In both cases, editing affects the overall beauty and clarity of the text, but in different ways (Lamb & McCormick, 2020, May 26).

From my perspective, the most important difference between handwriting and mechanized writing is the way the flow of thought is affected. When I type, the presence of autocorrect sometimes interrupts my idea rhythm. The software may change or suggest something that alters the structure of the sentence. This can break the natural stream of my thinking and shift my focus from meaning to correction. When I write by hand, even though it feels harder for me now, my thoughts and my hand move together. I do not worry too much in the moment about whether the word is perfectly correct; instead, the fluency of the sentence and the clarity of the idea show themselves more naturally. With practice, handwriting can also be very enjoyable because of the beauty of the script itself (Kiefer et al., 2015).

I also feel that handwriting leaves a kind of trace of my learning. The small corrections and crossed-out words remain visible on the page, like a memory of my past mistakes. When I look back, I can see where I wrote a wrong word or made a grammatical error, and it reminds me that I am improving. With typing, this does not happen. Because of this, I personally prefer handwriting, since it carries both aesthetic value and a visible record of growth, even though typing is more practical in my daily work.

References:

Clement, R. W. (1997). Medieval and Renaissance Book Production. Utah State University.

Kiefer, M., Schuler, S., Mayer, C., Trumpp, N. M., Hille, K., & Sachse, S. (2015). Handwriting or Typewriting? The Influence of Pen- or Keyboard-Based Writing Training on Reading and Writing Performance in Preschool Children. Adv Cogn Psychol, 11(4), 136-146. https://doi.org/10.5709/acp-0178-7

Lamb, R., & McCormick, J. (2020, May 26). From the vault: Invention of the book, part 1 & 2.

Lekamge, R., & Smith, C. (2025). Impact of Auto-Correction Features in Text-Processing Software on the Academic Writing of ESL Learners. English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 22(1), 69-91.

My Journey with a Voice-to-Text Story (Task 3)

This week, for maybe the second or third time, I tried using apps that change voice to text (https://speechnotes.co/). Because of this, I decided to share a memory about the first book I prepared and published about thirty years ago. I read the story in simple English into the app. Of course, English is my second language, so some of my pronunciations may not have been clear. The result was very surprising for me. Below, you can see the text that the app created. After that, I will share my thoughts about the text and how the app changed my words. At the end of my post, I will also include the edited version so you can compare and see the differences.

The voice-to-text story feels different from normal written English. It sounds more like someone talking than like something written down. The sentences are long and run together without punctuation, so it’s hard to tell where one idea ends and another begins. Sometimes small words like “the” are missing. There are also grammar mistakes and odd word choices. For example, “library well very strict with big box light Britannica” or “many of their Ray sources” don’t make sense. These are mistakes from the speech-to-text program. In proper writing, sentences would be shorter, the verb tense would stay the same, and the words would be clearer.

Still, the text is not all wrong. There are some problems like run-on sentences, wrong verb forms, misheard words, missing punctuation, and confusing sections. It doesn’t show the tone of voice or body language you’d expect when someone is speaking. But the story itself makes sense. It shows feelings of nostalgia, effort, and pride. The voice feels personal and conversational, which makes it sound like a real person telling their own story. Most importantly, the main ideas still come through. We can see how hard research was before the internet and how much patience and passion it took.

The most common mistakes are easy to spot. The sentences run on because I don’t talk in neat, written chunks. Misheard words happen because the app guesses at sounds and sometimes gets them wrong. Missing words show up because the app often skip little words like “the” or “to” when they talk. Verb tense changes appear because I jump between past and present without noticing. These are considered mistakes because they don’t follow the rules of written English. That makes the text harder to read and less exact.

If the story had been scripted, it would look very different. I made it shorter and easier to read, with correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling. I try to stick the main points like the libraries, the copying rules, the translations, and the handwritten drafts. Also, there wouldn’t be as much repetition or side-tracking. But something would also be lost. The natural emotion of the spoken version might disappear. Oral storytelling has a kind of life and feeling that a scripted version can’t always capture.

This shows how oral storytelling is not the same as written storytelling. Oral stories feel alive because they use tone, pauses, and even body language to make them real. When people talk, they may go off topic, say the same thing again, or switch verb tenses, and that’s okay in speech. But, written stories are different. They need structure, spelling, punctuation, and grammar to make sense. They aim to be clear because the reader can’t hear the voice or see the gestures. Oral storytelling connects with people in the moment. Written storytelling is built to last.

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