On one hand (heh) there’s apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren’t typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful.
On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as… intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it’s all just fetishizing living a more analogue life.
It actually makes the techbro in me think there’s something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you do choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable.
I suppose that’s actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there will just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again.
…Meanwhile I’m pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That’s sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I’m finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don’t get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I’d get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things.
TL;DR someone who’s bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal
I journal and take notes regularly by hand and have written novel-length manuscripts in the last couple of years by hand. I prefer using fountain pens or else my hand cramps up (and using anything else for that amount of writing can get a bit wasteful). I don’t know if it’s better for my memory, but I prefer it for other reasons.
My process is to write a first draft by hand to minimize digital distractions. I take my notebook and pen somewhere without internet, and leave my laptop and phone behind. Then, I type it up, and this is a sort of “natural” 2nd draft process, as I obviously make smaller or larger edits as I’m re-reading my own work.
My mom still has notebooks from when she was in high school. Digital amnesia means I don’t have any of my high school and college homework anymore. I developed this system because realized I was putting a lot of effort into managing digital backups of all of my drafts and shit when simple folders and stacks of paper would do fine. But really, I mostly do it because I have ADHD, and using computers to write longform drafts is difficult because they are highly distracting devices. Typewriters and notebooks that only do one thing make things more straightforward for me. So, for me it’s basically an ADHD accommodation, I get why most people don’t approach things this way in 2023.