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A fountain pen writing on lined paper

The quiet case for writing by hand

A pen is slower than a keyboard. That is exactly the point.

Photo by Aaron Burden / Unsplash

I write my first drafts by hand. It is slow, my handwriting is terrible, and I have to type everything again afterwards. I would not do it any other way.

Writing by hand forces a sentence to be finished in the head before it reaches the paper. There is no deleting, only crossing out, and the crossings out stay visible: a record of how the thought changed its mind.

Try it for a week: a notebook, a pen you like, ten minutes a day. You may find that you think differently when you cannot type.

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