The point made in Innis (2007) about the drastic increase in speed of the printing press can be applied to mechanical writing versus typing. I am a fast typer; according to monkeytype.com I can type at a speed of 113 words per minute with 99% accuracy. Because of this, I vastly prefer typing over writing. That said, going through most of my elementary school in Canada during the mid to late 90s, I learned to write cursive, which is far faster than printing, and going through high school in the early 2000s prior to the spread of laptops, handwriting was what I relied on to take notes, and this continued throughout the mid ’00s when laptops were just beginning to be popularized, but issues such as the lack of touchscreens and styluses meant that I still took most of my notes by hand, especially in my subject area of chemistry that required a lot of formulas and diagrams.
This task was for the most part easy: even though it’s been two decades since I wrote so much by hand (and at one point my hand was sore), my pen flowed quickly (though slower than 113 words per minute). There was at least one instance where I had an additional thought, but because of my writing pace, by the time I finished writing the current sentence I lost the new thought for a bit. This almost never happens when I type due my typing speed allowing me to quickly getting my current thought down before quickly moving on to the next.
Out of habit from my high school days in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, I double spaced my work and wrote in pen (pencil is not permitted on official IB submissions). The additional spacing allowed room for edits, and any mistakes made with pen had one line crossed out and replaced by subsequent words. This too differed greatly than digital, where edits end up invisible in the final document.
Reference
Innis, H. (2007). Empire and communications. Dundurn Press.
Li, Y. (2024, June 4). As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory.’ New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/business/china-internet-censorship.html