Word Nerds and the Power of Handwriting
Author: Wendy Elford Issue: 2022-10-19
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Word Nerds and the Power of Handwriting
by Wendy Elford
Words always seem to wiggle their way into my world and their wiggly source in handwriting never seems to be too far away. Or at least that was my history.
Recently I had to write something out by hand, a longer document, and I could not believe how tired my hand and forearm became.
I train for walking on hills, but not for writing anymore. Which is fine if your definition for thinking while walking is exercise squared. Now I do have some limitations with the awkward terrain bit if you want to take distance walking into account, however in taking my words for a walk, my thoughts for a walk on paper, should be straightforward. And it isn't.
The human factors consultant in me knows that the process of writing is keyed into the very thinking, like drawing as thought is. A famous physicist when told his books were a record of his thoughts, returned with the quotable statement that they were the very thoughts themselves.
Now, the technology to join up what was said with what is recorded on paper–and think here as converting this to handwriting to digital form as text, or keeping a digital record of the (hopefully readable) scrawl is one possible saviour of what was going down in our minds as the scrawling happened. I am reminded of my grandmother's loopy words which I find every time I attempt to translate her recipe book to cook up a memory of my past. I am also reminded of two or three years where I used a recording pen and my more recent experiments with writeable, erasable paper.
Livescribe, RocketbookSo now we can double down on tech-supported options, perhaps at a superficial level for now. Pens that record the words as the text flows in cursive under your hand. Pens that transmit the scrawl–done on special paper or a special book–to a digital device either real time as a batch upload. Devices that wipe clean or paper that does. Pens that write on paper that is not really paper but behaves that way.
And the devil for word nerds who handwrite? Not exhaustion of tired hands and forearms, though that is indeed a challenge for me. I write long hand so little now it does not look like getting any better. Particularly with looming carpal tunnel in one hand (my left) and the promise of that in my right. Gel pens are my friend, though. Especially the coloured ones.
It's where I am faulty, fitness to write or a wobbly hand (not yet), that my inputs fail. The willingness to be consistent is another hurdle. Or is that really the issue? What about audio processing disorder too? So many ways to fail as a human and so little time to do it in and to recover from that and get smarter.
Sometimes the product does not help me. My rechargeable pens would not charge. The fault was simple. The plastic housing could not take the pressure of the recharging cable and so, like my tired forearm and hand, they ran out of juice. And an electronic pen that cannot recharge becomes a writing pen only. With expensive ink inserts.
The product failing me is in theory not going to limit me if I don't mind forsaking what I had already written as audio notes in the books. Half-written notes with audio I will never hear. The sadness of thoughts that are trapped in the books.
And so now I go back to the handwriting and remember that it is in the motion of the pen on the book that I baked something into my body which is not lost and never will be. The words that were spoken are held in half--downloaded audio files partly on the paper and partly in my memory. The words are not really lost and most of the notes–even if available–were, if I am honest, never going to make themselves into something sophisticated and edited. Another failure or perhaps something to accept?
And still I experiment with technology, this time a pen that can be wiped off a special type of paper and I take an image of that thought. Which gets filed–and maybe not ever accessed again. And the cycle of trapping words in some object or walking or writing them into my neurology continues as I consume and walk and write and think my way into making sense of the words that float past me in the many worlds I pass through.
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