Manual Scripts & Potato Printing

Handwriting for the sake of handwriting

• Do you normally write by hand or type? Did you find this task difficult or easy? Explain.

I probably type more often than I handwrite. Especially if I include all of the emails I write on a daily basis, however I enjoy handwriting. I find that I retain more information if I handwrite notes while reading a text and so I will often keep a note pad next to my computer. I also enjoy the act of hand writing and I appreciate calligraphy. Writing 500 words was a bit of a challenge, I needed to take a break to rest my hand after completing the first page of text and I found that my writing became messy after the first couple of sentences. I find the final product enjoyable to look at and the feel of the paper, creased with the pressure of the pen, satisfying. I would like to spend more time handwriting, however for any professional correspondence or paper it is not feasible to handwrite.

• What did you do when you made a mistake or wanted to change your writing? How did you edit your work? Did your choice of media play a part in how you edited your work?

I used a black gel pen on white printer paper and white-out tape to correct my mistakes. I thought ahead before writing each sentence in order to get my thoughts together, to avoid making more mistakes than necessary. A couple of times when I made an error I corrected it immediately with white out. I would like to go back and edit the text now but, it would be difficult to white-out entire sentences to re-write them in the same specific space. If I had used pencil I may have been more willing to correct mistakes or re-write certain sentences. I chose white printer paper because I wanted to be able to use the white-out tape to correct mistakes and it does not have the same effect on lined paper, but this made it hard to keep my writing straight and neat. I find that as a final product white printer paper makes the work look more finished and professional, closer to a printed document. I think the freedom of typing on a computer, being able to edit at section without impacting the rest of the text, is something that changes the way we write. It is so much less permanent to type something, seeing as it can easily be highlighted and erased, then when we are writing in pen. The medium does change the act and therefore has an impact on the message itself. I chose to write about something I know a lot about off the top of my head, in order to avoid making mistakes that could not be easily fixed.

• What do you feel is the most significant difference between writing by hand and using mechanized forms of writing? Which do you prefer and why?

I think the major advantage to writing in a mechanize form, on the computer specifically, it the ability to re-write and edit work without compromising the entire document. If I wanted to change the order of the sentences I could simply copy and paste them, with a hand written document I would have to erase the entire thing and re-write all of the sentences that needed to be fixed, the final work would look messy and I would likely need to re-copy it. Hand writing also takes more time, I can quickly type 500 words but it took me over 30 minutes to write this document by hand. I can also type for the better part of a day without needing to take a physical break for my hands but after only 15 minutes of writing by hand I needed to take a break.  I have reasonably clear writing, likely from practice writing notes for my students over the years, however some peoples handwriting is almost indecipherable. Typed text is much easier to read. I don’t want to lose the hand written text, I enjoy the medium and I think I express myself more fully when I have to handwrite, however I do see the advantages, and they are numerous, to typing over hand writing.

Printing with potatoes

• Was there something particularly challenging in the process?

When I first read the task I was reminded of doing this activity in grade 2 or 3 with images and colourful tetra paints. “If I could do this as a small child it will be easy to do” I thought. I first wrote the word I wanted to print on paper in thick sharpie. I then almost went to carve it out forward and as it was written before realizing that I would have to flip the word backwards. Happily my sharpie wrote through the paper and I was able to use the back of the paper as the image to copy. It is quite difficult to write backwards and I confess to having written the Q with the tail going the other way, despite having a correct reversed image in front of me to copy from.

• How much time did it take for you to create the stamps?

I spent around 20 minutes craving out both stamps. I have some experience carving pumpkins in an intricate manner and I used the same technique with the potato stamps. Obviously it is much more annoying to carve a stamp than it is to simply write the words but at 20 minutes for 10 letters that’s only two minutes a letter. I think if I had an alphabet of stamps it might not be too tedious to use them individually to write out a couple of sentences, but I can also understand that without mechanization this system is quite tedious.

• Have you notice anything particular about the letters that you have chosen to reproduce?

As I was carving I was kicking myself for not carving more straight letters, like l or t. I also found carving the middle out of the Q and the a was difficult and I was worried about breaking the line as I carved it out. The more circular letters are actually more clear in reverse than the k and the r but all are quite legible. I think writing the word out in all caps would actually have been easier but I didn’t think it would fulfil the brief.

• Considering the time and effort that took you to create a 5-letter word, how do you feel about the mechanization of writing?

I don’t believe that anyone thinks carving potatoes with individual words is a successful way to print words. It was made clear in the podcast “How it began, a history of the modern world: The Printed Book: Opening the Floodgates of Knowledge” by Brad Harris, that the carving of wooden blocks to print whole pages of text was not a technology that took off. The potato is also quite fragile and I don’t know if I could print many copies using these stamps. I might be able to make a dozen before the quality really started to go downhill. It was mentioned that this was one of the reasons the wooden block technique never took off, because the wood soon lost it’s definition. The advent of the printing press, with metallic letters that get stuck into the apparatus one letter at a time was so successful because of the longevity of the letters themselves and the ability to re-shuffle the same metal letters to make different pages of text. Like in screen printing today the set up cost of this kind of stamp printing or even the Gutenberg press is a lot of time and material at first for a big payoff if there are enough prints required. The press allowed the easy dissemination of texts, although for individual texts, like correspondence, the press would not be worth the effort. Mechanization of was a huge advent and increase the affordability of the book, but it was not near the shift that a computer word processor would become.

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