In Defence of Writing by Hand

In our technologically advanced world, everything is becoming increasingly digitised. This can be a good thing that saves busy people time and effort. It can reduce pressure on overworked individuals and increase productivity.

However, I feel that the writing process is becoming, in some ways, somewhat soulless as a result. when was the last time you sent a handwritten letter? Even birthday cards are often abandoned in favour of e-cards. Of course, high postage prices and somewhat unreliable mail systems are partially to blame for this. But there are other things you probably write up on a computer now - blog articles, for example.

Do I have time to write up all my blog posts by hand? Of course not, I'm a sixth-form college student working on an English Literature coursework essay, three English Language course work articles and to top the whole thing off a print magazine and a website for Media. I rarely have the headspace for writing a good article since I'm currently gathering every creative particle in my body and focusing it on these projects. When I do manage to grasp a spare thread of inspiration, I tend to park myself at my Mac and type it up on there. Pre-college, I'd almost always write articles in my notebook first. Now my focus is publishing quality content as often as I am able to, rather than enjoying the writing itself.

I miss writing for the journey as much as the destination. The pleasure we take in the writing process is one of the only things separating us from the artificial intelligence that can churn out a 1000-word essay in a minute or two. And surely the reason that we love high-quality stationery is because of the joy we feel when we use them to create a piece of writing, no matter how small it may be? Of course, I understand that lots of people feel they work better at a computer, and that's absolutely fine. We all work best in different ways, but I think that a lot of us in the stationery community probably got into this hobby because we enjoy writing things by hand.

We recently had an author come into college to give a lecture, and she said that handwriting is an integral part of her writing process. She explained that it helps her to be more creative and gives her brain more time to think. She also said that a comfortable writing instrument is an important tool, because you probably won't produce your best work if your wrist is throbbing. I agree on both of those points - most of my most popular articles were hand-written before publication and I prefer producing them this way. In fact, I'm writing this one manually!

I think that cutting handwriting out of my workflow has resulted in the lack of inspiration I've felt periodically since starting my A-level studies, and over the holidays I have started integrating it back into my day again. my advice to any blogger feeling the same way would be to sit down with real paper and a real pen, and just write. You might recapture the joy of making words into paragraphs, and paragraphs into articles. It has definitely helped me!