On one hand (heh) there’s apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren’t typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful.
On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as… intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it’s all just fetishizing living a more analogue life.
It actually makes the techbro in me think there’s something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you do choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable.
I suppose that’s actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there will just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again.
…Meanwhile I’m pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That’s sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I’m finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don’t get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I’d get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things.
TL;DR someone who’s bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal
When I bought my iPad Pro I imagined I’d have this thing filled with gigabytes of handwritten text but that’s not the case at all. It’s not even the feeling of pen and paper that makes not want to use the iPad… it’s the immediate access to write and read what I want, that only a notebook and pen can provide. The iPad is filled with other apps and distractions, it heats up when you rest your palm on it, there’s always this anxiousness of balancing brightness and battery life.
Also, with handwritten messages you can convey so much more that it’s impossible to do with typed text. You can determine how fast or how methodical the person was while writing. You can convey emotions by how much strength you use or by the size and kerning of the letters, and also, a lot of the personality traits of the writer are mirrored on their calligraphy.
And yes, typing with a keyboard is so much faster, which enables me to ramble, which I often do I and I just did.
I take a lot of quick notes throughout the day that I need to see for up to a week in my peripheral as reminders, but also strongly dislike seeing sticky notes all over my desk.
Been looking at the new Kobo e-ink tablets because of basically everything you said about your iPad.
They aren’t cheap, so ive been hoping that someone would talk me out of it.