Writing Longhand vs Keyboard

From Kate’s Writing Crate…

 

Somewhere long ago I heard someone say the physical act of continuous motion of your pen on paper connects your brain to your heart through your fingertips. You plug in your intuition. So, I write by hand every day. I doodle. I keep lists of ideas, which become a crazy haiku that I can sometimes decipher.

--Suzi Baum

 

For it would seem…that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fiber of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

 --Virginia Woolf

 

Writing by hand is also like…"sculpting words with a pen".

I read that phrase recently, but couldn’t find it again so I don’t know who wrote it. Normally I underline phrases, sentences, or passages I like in books or copy them into my notebooks or common books, but this time I only remember reading it so I apologize for having no attribution, but the phrase is so true for me I had to include it.

Since I’ve studied graphology, I’m interested in handwriting. It does look artistic from many angles, but I know it’s a form of sculpture from the solid callous near the top joint of my middle finger  that formed over years of holding a pen firmly while I inscribed my words into paper. Yes, into paper. I write firmly enough to be able to feel the words on the back of pages when I’m scribbling fast and furiously.

I love to write longhand in my favorite 80-page notebooks with my favorite pens—I favor blue ink in the Bic Cristal 1.6mm pen. (Not a paid endorsement.) It’s inexpensive and fast-writing as my hand tries to keep up with my thoughts—the qualities of a useful pen as recommended by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones (page 5). She prefers cheap Schaeffer fountain pens.

The point of being a writer is to write. Before I had any paid assignments, I followed Natalie Goldberg’s advice to fill a notebook a month using fast-writing pens. I wrote about anything and everything to get those pages filled. My ideas and feelings oozed out through my pen mixed with what I had read, heard, and learned along the way. Over time my writing style appeared and shaped my work. I wrote all the time. In short, it’s how I became a writer.

I did this for years while in school, before and after jobs I hated—sometimes during, too—until I started my first magazine staff writing job which I wouldn’t have landed without all the writing practice in notebooks. As I began to write more professionally, I still filled a notebook a month until my writing assignments took up the majority of my time.

Now I spend most of my professional writing time using a keyboard. Writing this way has its charms: easy to do, easy to read, easy to reorganize, easy to delete, and easy to email—which is I why I can work from home.

These are all the reasons I love writing using a keyboard and computer, but I will never give up filling notebooks with my thoughts, ideas, and quotes that appeal to me with attributions because I love the feel of a pen in my hand. I love how intuitive I feel when writing with a pen. I love filling pages with words leaving trails of ink in my unique style.

I also love looking at these notebooks years later. They are proof I have written as opposed to Word docs that were never printed out only emailed to editors to appear in magazine issues. Not only are these pages sculpted by the words I inscribed, but the filled notebooks are also haphazardly-piled colorful sculptures displayed on shelves around my home. I love knowing I’ve created art.

 

Graphology

From Kate’s Writing Crate…

           We all remember the stubby pencils we were given in school and the really wide-ruled paper with the extra dashed lines so we would learn where lowercase letters mostly started. Posted on the wall was the alphabet written A a B b C c D d…Z z so we had a model to follow as we copied the letters on our pages. Soon we could write our own words down. A few grades later, we learned cursive, switched to pens, and then the fun began.

          Printing is useful, but cursive is beautiful. I loved everything about writing in cursive. I loved pens more than pencils. I loved all the colors of ink though I mostly used blue and black. I loved the embellishments that made my handwriting unique. And I loved that I could write almost as fast as I thought.

          Everyone’s handwriting should be uniform. We all learned the same alphabet with the same standard letters. Yet once we graduated to cursive, we went our own ways: easy to read or difficult, large or small letters, slanted or straight up. We wrote in ways comfortable to ourselves.

I never thought any more about it than that until I learned about graphology, the analysis of handwriting.

          Decades ago, I was reading The Tightrope Walker by Dorothy Gilman—a murder mystery that starts with a written clue found hidden inside a hurdy-gurdy. Needing more information than just the words in the note, the lead character decides a graphologist’s opinion would be helpful.

          I had never heard of a graphologist, but I thought it was a fascinating profession. After I finished the book, I looked up graphologists to see if there were any nearby. There were five in the closest big city and one was a woman so I called her.

          I explained to her that I had just finished a book with a graphologist as a character and that I was interested in learning more about graphology. As most people do when they are passionate about a topic, she started to explain what she did. I asked her how she was trained, who hired her, and what she could tell about people she’d never met.

We talked for about twenty minutes. Then she said she would examine my handwriting if I filled out a form and mailed it back to her which I did. Her analysis was spot on and I was hooked. I signed up for a class on graphology immediately and bought books on the subject. I learned how to “read” handwriting. Graphology is an amazing, insightful field of study.

When I worked as an accountant, one of my bosses discovered an embezzler. I didn’t know about graphology then, but I remembered the person wrote with very unusual o’s. They were more like upside down u’s, open at the bottom. I had never seen this before. While I was studying graphology, I discovered this can be a handwriting trait of an embezzler.

The way you write your letters like m’s, k’s, capital I’s, etc. is revealing as is the overall look of your handwriting. Slant, size, and strength (how deep is the impression on the paper) can tell how empathetic, detail-oriented, and emphatic you are among other things. There is a literary trait in handwriting, too—any e’s and cursive lowercase r’s that look similar to a reversed 3.

Graphology is a great tool for learning about character traits in general as well as in people you need to deal with on a regular basis. This knowledge can help you get along better with them.

So dot your i’s and cross your t’s then study how others do the same. The similarities and differences are illuminating.