We were given the choice of one of two options for this week’s task, one of our choices was to write a roughly 500-word text by hand, the other to create a potato stamp of a five letter word.

I chose to complete both of the options for this week’s task as they both sparked my interest.

Manual Script

I chose to use the opportunity to write a short reflection of my MET journey as I come to the end of the program.

Writing by hand is an everyday activity for me, I often prefer to take notes and plan things out by hand and will often write by hand if I am feeling stuck or have difficulty composing discussion posts or assignments on the computer. While I write by hand everyday, I don’t normally compose a single piece of this length and there was a bit of hand fatigue by the time I finished, otherwise I did not find it any harder a task than other weekly MET activities.

I was roughly halfway through writing when I noticed that I was writing almost exclusively in cursive, or at least my version of it, normally I write in a combination of cursive and printing – I suspect that on a subconscious level I wanted my writing to appear neater, more consistent and perhaps more complex. I would likely not make it in an ancient scriptorium as there are errors in spelling and my penmanship is not consistent throughout. When it came to errors, a quick double, or triple, cross through and I kept on going. I am definitely a product of the ‘spell check generation’, relying of the Word to help me with my spelling and grammar so there are likely a number of misspellings throughout. I find that I am much more forgiving with misspellings and incorrect grammar when I write by hand, then when I type, though it may also be blissful ignorance. With most of my planning work I tend to work in pencil so that an error or a shift in direction is only a few quick swipes with an eraser away, versus a messy page of scratched out text, or parts of the page with a big X or scribble through. I also did not go back to reread and edit the text, like I would with a typed composition, not wanting to rewrite it altogether.

One of the biggest differences I find when writing by hand or composing on a computer is the level of planning and forethought I put into the process. When I am typing, I tend to follow a stream of consciousness almost flying by the seat of my pants as it is easy to make changes and undo anything that doesn’t make sense when I finish with it, even major changes don’t take very long. When writing by hand, especially when writing in pen like in this exercise, I tend to put more thought into what I am writing before I actually write it out, often composing a sentence or two ahead of my hand since an error in the middle of the page either means a great deal of crossing through, whiting out, or starting from scratch and having to redo all the work already completed. This is one of the reasons I turn to writing by hand for a first draft if I am feeling stuck in a paper or assignment, the level of focus seems to increase when writing by hand, there isn’t the blank white screen with the blinking cursor seemingly taunting me and no distractions only a mouse click away.

My Manual Script

---

Potato Printing

Instead of a written reflection of my attempts at printing using a potato I decided to narrate a time-lapse of my stamp making process shown below.