Writing by hand

The quality of my handwriting took a dip a few years ago as I began using computers all the time, but it's levelled off. I'm looking at a handwritten list of songs I'm looking for, which I wrote out last night. I'm pretty sure anybody would be able to read it.

The interesting bit is that the form of the method has profound effects on the style of the writing: I have this vague hope that someone will one day write a monograph that examines the whole history of literature this way. Hand-writing prose steers you toward clean, conventional sentences with well-chosen words. The age of newsrooms and typewriters gave us styles like Hemingway’s, where the prose has the same sparse, weighty quality of type on a blank page. And it’s impossible to imagine a style like David Foster Wallace’s without the personal computer: even leaving aside the footnotes, it takes a certain facility with typing to bother tracing thoughts out through long, winding, clause-heavy, speed-of-speech sentences.

This is all completely apart from the question itself, but I find it interesting. I prefer to type, but I have a desktop computer; if I write anything “serious” longhand, it’s usually because I’m away from home or specifically trying to avoid fast-typing styled prose. The bulk of the longhand writing I do, though, is on pieces of other people’s fictions—notes, edits, commentary, and so forth. If I’m writing anything shorter than a whole paragraph, I tend to write in an all-caps note style that’s derived from my father—though his writing had the unusual feature of putting vowels and Hs in cap-sized lower-case forms. I make a great deal of notes, as well: in classes, on the subway, listening to records for review, reading.

Also I’m very much in favor of illegible signatures. The signature is rarely if ever used to identify the associated name. I like the thought that we could all have such abstracted scrawls that they’d return to being “our mark”: just a stroke of the pen that only we know how to make, and which nobody else would have any guide—even the letters of the name—to imitating.

Don DeLillo has said he uses a typewriter because he thinks it's more visceral, and he likes being able to see the arrangement of his words on an actual page rather than on a screen.

The crappy-writer-buys-typewriter thing is probably more of a holdover stereotype from being a college English major; I should try and get rid of it.

And x-post: I agree about fragments and notes, which are definitely a hand thing. And you’re totally right: it would make a lot more sense for informal handwriting to be the loose format and Official Typing to be the one that makes you choose carefully. Maybe it’s limited to fiction—do you write any fiction? I dunno. It’s a time thing, I think—enough effort goes to handwriting a sentence that there’s some tendency to keep it clean. (Maybe I’m just lazy.) Whereas the easy editing and fast typing of a PC can let you just chatter away endlessly, or follow out all the junk people throw into sentence when they’re speaking—things where, if you were writing slowly by hand, you’d think about along the way and maybe cut out.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v506/Paronomasiac/write0001.jpg

hemingway hated his journalism! and windy can't = computer! henry james! milton! sorry! just being an asshole!

anyway i like writing by hand bcz i can draw non linear scratches and self-commentary all over the page. i like legal pads, too.

I'm still shocked by how few websites use hand-drawn words and/or graphics, it's weird, because it really does stand out.

http://deanna.ladyinterference.com/ilx/quickscan09082003.gif

Anyway, there are many occasions when I feel the need to jot down something in longhand, such as taking notes or when I'm making lists away from the computer. However, it *is* easier typing things out, certainly, and even my high school diary was maintained via a computer file, so, um, there. (I'm also up for handwriting analysis too, FYI.)

I think it's so cool, BTW, that some of us are posting handwriting examples! Awesome -- thanks, CJ and Rock Hardy!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v357/sleepycaitlin/diaryextract.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v357/sleepycaitlin/diaryextract.jpg

("teenage handwriting" for me = overloopy, "cutesy" writing with little circles for dots. Or, rather, "preteen handwriting" -- I *think* when I was 14 I grew out of that. Um, thank God.)

There are people I work with who still write like that, despite being a good ten or twenty years too old for it. I try to avoid them.

I know it's wrong to practice handwriting snobbery and really, I can totally deal with all kinds of handwriting (I mean, like, I have zero problems with any of the writing posted up here as examples), but, yeah, the overcutesy type is just... ugh, no.

I've been hand-writing notes (from lecture and readings) for school for the past year, on the theory that actually writing stuff down (not just typing it) helps me remember it better, and it's weird how bad I still am at writing by hand. My handwriting is the same as it's always been, a tiny scrawl, but I find myself dropping or switching letters very frequently. This might have to do with trying to read an article and write notes on it at the same time, or I may have lost the ability to write by hand.

Do you write anything by hand anymore?

i hate writing by hand so much, would love to never do it again

I kind of like it. Don't get to do it a lot anymore. I looked at some gradeschool and high school papers last week, that I've been keeping for no real reason, and found it hard to believe we ever DIDN'T type anything.

My hand starts to hurt really quickly also.

^ out of context etc

i'm writing my bar exam essays by hand. should be really fun.

I do a lot of hand-writing -- the one thing that gets me is that a good portion of it is at work, and if you have messy or scattered handwriting at work it can create the impression that you're messy or scattered at your job. So I am trying to practice writing more slowly and methodically, but (ironically) that's hardest to do when I'm most focused on and engaged with the actual thing I'm working on.

i dig writing by hand as long as i have a nice pen and nice paper, but not for very long.

that sentence is a thing of wonder, max

i had to write by hand a lot at my old job, and my hand was hurting so much that it was a serious motivation for me to jobhunt.

I still keep a spiral notebook journal, and write stories and reviews on legal yellow pads – anything to keep me away from the internetz. I'm too easily distracted these days.

thanks nabisco imagine what it would look like longhand

I can do the cool trick of writing down verbatim what a person just barely said while talking & carrying on over it, asking further questions, etc.

i use a quill and vellum

h8 writing things down - always tell ppl no its okay ill remember when they want me to do so even tho i rarely do

just wrote out something in my school notes, then, in attempting to underline it, crossed it out. good job, hand.

Sure those last three words are the right round way?

then, in attempting to underline it, crossed it out

at least you didn't just put {u} and {/u} at either end

lols.

i still write all my poetry by hand, and send postcards to specific friends every couple of months because hey, that's what i do.

essays--notes by hand.

in seminars and workshops-- i want to kill everyone with computers. so distracting to be in a room full of five or ten people discussing work or various 'academic' topics whilst one douchebag is fucking clickety-clacking away. if i am ever a college professor, i will ban computers in my classroom unless they're being used for presentation reasons.

I banned their use in my classes, but it's easier to supervise in a room of 27 students. A lecture hall with 190 students, however, is a different story.

You don't get letters like this any more. Except on Twitter.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1342/1314406887_bdc3b5de76.jpg

I found a while back when I wanted to write people handwritten letters for fun, I felt like I needed to draw :) and =) into the letters. The hell!? I mean, thats what my communicative ability's been reduced to?

And yet, between 1985 and 1990 I wrote dozens of letters every week, to my boyfriend, to penfriends interstate and overseas, pages and pages of them. Always with shitty handwriting. And perhaps some pics of Peter Murphy cut out and glued into a corner. Yeah yeah shoosh.

Now, I write notes on my work diary when a caller asks for something, and I'll occasionally get the lined notebook or (lol) Moleskine out and jot down a random bit of song lyric/poem I'm working on. But thats died off heavily just in the last few years, my writing's dried up horribly.

Its so sad :/

Lately I've found that I do better if I write my creative stuff out longhand before I put it on computer. It feels like I edit myself less when I write longhand, like I trust my instincts better, and it's easier to get a flow going somehow. But when I write straight onto computer, at least creatively, that first draft takes such a long time because I can so easily delete everything I write. I find the computer's better for editing the drafts that I write longhand....because by then my hand is tired and crampy and typing feels like such a breeeeeeze.

Someone mentioned Neal Stephenson's longhand manuscript upthread....tis true, they have one of them at the Sci Fi Museum in Seattle. I took a picture of it...I know it's ass but you get the idea...:

http://i412.photobucket.com/albums/pp201/sharonjoy666/P1100086.jpg

i have always had terrible handwriting and have always felt bad about it, because i like writing and it seems like a failure that i can't make it look good. so really, the move to keyboarding was a big relief. i understand the romance of the written word and all that and can appreciate other people's finely turned script. i just can't do it. my handwritten notes, when i have the occasion for them, tend toward all caps, because at least then it's legible.

i can't imagine writing anything long by hand anymore. i haven't since college essay exams. i would hate it. (i do still take notes by hand when i'm doing interviews, but that's just reference material, and nobody but me has to be able to make it out.)

the liking your own handwriting must have something to do with it. I admit that I am fond of my handwriting. So writing by hand = thinly veiled narcissm? Y/N?

I like my handwriting but I hate having my picture taken or seeing myself in pictures. So do I simultaneously love and hate myself?

i have pretty unco as a child - related to my poor eyesight - so to combat my slow handwriting speed i was taught to touch-type when i was about 7 and went through school using either electric typewriters or laptops. my handwriting is pretty scratchy, but passable - just takes too long to get stuff down on paper.