Why Longhand Writing Trumps Typing
I come from a generation (the last generation probably) that unlike young people today didn’t grow up using keyboards for the majority of their writing tasks. Although I got a good old-fashioned typewriter when I was eight years old, and my first computer (a C64) when I was fourteen, I never used either device more than an hour or two a day. Okay, there were quite a few days when I used the C64 for way more than two hours, but that usually involved the use of a joystick rather than the keyboard.
I didn’t start using a computer for writing until I was nineteen or twenty, and although I did write three full-length novels using a keyboard in the ’90s, typing and I never became the closest of friends, and we never will. Today I’m employing a somewhat awkward and little elaborated three-to-five-finger typing system, using mostly the index finger of my left and the index and middle fingers of my right hand, with the occasional assistance of either thumb. It’s not a pretty sight, but it can be reasonably fast - faster than writing longhand even - or it could be, if it weren’t for those damned typos. (read more)
I didn’t start using a computer for writing until I was nineteen or twenty, and although I did write three full-length novels using a keyboard in the ’90s, typing and I never became the closest of friends, and we never will. Today I’m employing a somewhat awkward and little elaborated three-to-five-finger typing system, using mostly the index finger of my left and the index and middle fingers of my right hand, with the occasional assistance of either thumb. It’s not a pretty sight, but it can be reasonably fast - faster than writing longhand even - or it could be, if it weren’t for those damned typos. (read more)