Typing about writing

It seems like the practice of handwriting is going out of style. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. I type at my job, text on my phone, and jot notes in an app instead of on paper. That’s a shame, because handwriting is cool, and it might be more meaningful than you think. Let me try to convince you to pick up a pencil.

Oh, the humanity

First: handwriting is slow. Everything else happens fast these days. But not writing—brain fast, hand slow. The natural slowness of writing forces me to be more deliberate, more intentional with my words.

Handwriting is also a nostalgia trigger, at least for me. When I sit down to write, I like to sharpen my pencil and smell the shavings, and boom, I’m right back in Mr. Campbell’s 7th grade history class.

Handwriting is imperfect. It’s more human and more personal than typing. Everyone’s handwriting is a little different, you know. People complimented me on my handwriting growing up. I was proud that my handwriting was so neat and readable, even if sometimes I thought it looked a bit girlish.

Some people have tidy handwriting, and future doctors have sloppy handwriting, but the typed word looks the same no matter who wrote it. It’s too perfect. Typed words are great for cold efficiency and quick skimming, but there’s no sign of a person behind the words.

If I’m typing and I make a mistake, I can delete words and reorder sections until I’m happy. Typing leaves no evidence of uncertainty or second thoughts; no eraser smudge or extra thick ink where I hesitated with the pen on the page and my heart in my throat.

Now we all have laptops and phones and we just type. But handwriting is so much more human, so beautifully human.

No more nubs

Our handwriting is a marker of our humanness, but it seems like we do it less and less. Even in school, homework is increasingly done online. What do people miss out on when they don’t practice writing, when the expectation is to type away on yet another screen instead of good ol’ paper and pencil?

Maybe students don’t get into a flow state when they write. Maybe they think that it’s normal to be distracted when you write, since we are always one click away from youtube or social media.

Maybe they don’t know the simple joy of writing with a dull pencil for a while and then getting up to go sharpen that bad boy. It’s like taking a beat up van to the mechanic and coming back with a Ferrari!

But then again, they also don’t know the heartbreak of sharpening a pencil perfectly only to have all of the lead fall out with the smallest pressure. So they dodged that bullet.

Maybe they don’t know what it’s like to pretend not to have a pencil so you can ask a cute girl to borrow one.

Maybe they don’t know the experience of finding a sweet new pencil on the floor that someone left behind. Or the increasingly comical situation of having a daily driver pencil, and using it every day until it’s just a nub. The nub is difficult to use, being a nub, and you have to contort your fingers in a weird way so that you can still use it, until one day you realize you can’t sharpen it anymore, so you retire it and give it a decorated funeral.

A seasoned veteran of the writing game 🫡

In a word, identity

Most importantly, they may not know just how much of our identity can be tucked away in our handwriting.

I remember that I used to see my friends’ style of writing over and over. This was before laptops took over middle schools, I guess. One friend made her lowercase E’s big and bubbly; another kid's essay was basically hieroglyphics until I realized the letter p was impersonating the letter b. One kid in my school had famously tiny handwriting, and I could never understand why on earth he would do that to himself. Maybe it’s just what felt comfortable, or maybe he did it for attention. If so, then it worked, because I still think about his handwriting to this day. You win, Brandon.

I used to copy quirks of handwriting from my friends. I remember adopting a certain style from Levi, one of my best friends. His lowercase T’s and L’s always had a signature curly tail. For some reason, I thought that was cool. So I took it. And some of my lowercase T’s and L’s are still zesty like that.

Growing up I remember seeing shopping lists on the counter, in Mom’s handwriting, and pondering why she wrote in a peculiar combination of cursive and print.

I remember seeing Dad’s hilariously sloppy handwriting on every birthday card (99% written by Mom, 100% endorsed by Dad).

Students today may not have the alien experience of seeing old assignments written by a younger version of themselves and wondering why the hell they wrote like that. (It’s me, I’m them.)

My mom kept a lot of old assignments that my siblings and I did. I understand keeping essays—we all wrote bizarre stories in elementary school, or at least I did, so I understand wanting to hold onto those. But for years I wondered why she held onto the everyday quizzes and tests. It makes more sense if some identity gets tied up in the words themselves.

That’s why a handwritten letter means more than a typed one. When I write something by hand, I’m giving you a tiny part of me. All of the imperfections, second thoughts, furiously scribbled notes in the margins, increasingly smaller font as I run out of space because I just kept thinking of things I wanted to say. There’s no spellcheck to catch my typos. There’s no AI to recommend a different phrasing. Just my thoughts on the page, plus any hot sauce that I accidentally got on the page after I already wrote it all.

So if you’re like me and you have happy memories of writing, but you’ve done it less and less as technology has taken over… grab a pencil and some paper and just go. Maybe what comes to mind will feel like the silliest, most useless thought. Doesn’t matter. Get it on paper and keep going. If you need to, you can swear to yourself that you’ll throw it away later. But write. No distractions. Just you and the page. And see what happens. Who knows, maybe eventually you’ll end up with a nub.