[telemachos]

I love that he talks about writing with pens and paper. Too many people overlook how useful this can be, I think.

When I was writing my dissertation, I followed this cycle:

+ Morning: Write new material, always by hand on legal pads, with the same pen (a relatively heavy, but thin Lamy ballpoint - good balance and weight, fine but clear ink, never clogged). Edit: I still have a callous on my finger from those two years of writing.

+ Lunch + shoot pool for a few hours (no books, clear head)

+ Afternoon: Type up what I hand wrote in the morning, edit old pages (on a screen or from print outs, that would vary) and take notes on articles and books.

Having time to think is what makes writing by hand so useful I think. It's like the (apocryphal?) Truman Capote response when he heard about Kerouac's automatic writing style: "That's not writing. It's typing." Too much of what we do is just typing rapidly, without thought.

Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper.

[fogus]

In my career I've often found that during "brainstorming" meetings the highly technical attendees very often use paper and pen while the more managerial always have various different high-tech devices.

just an observation from my own career and not meant as indicative of anything in reality

[keithpeter]

As mentioned above, I use artists sketchbooks (A5 or A4). I have found by accident that opening a hard-backed notebook in a meeting and taking notes induces mild paranoia in manager types.

Managers I have worked for have used: Psion organisers, palm pilots, various laptops including the old style Thinkpad tablets, various smart phones from Blackberry to iPhone, and, latterly, iPads.

I just have a shelf of sketchbooks.

[keithpeter]

"Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper."

With me it is a drawing. Diagrams, mind-maps, tables, doodles, phrases floating around distributed spatially by the degree of affinity. I find paper/pen just a lot quicker for that. Nowt posh just Biro and A4 copy paper or a sketchbook. I find the fashionable Moleskine paper to be too thin so I use artists sketchbooks or an Alwych notebook

http://www.sohcahtoa.org.uk/legacy/blog/notes/white-van-driv...

clipboards are important. A local discount art materials shop has A3 clipboards (6mm thick) aimed at sketchers going for £4. Must get.

[mwcampbell]

To counterbalance this budding glorification of handwriting, I'll reiterate here the drawbacks of handwritten text which have more to do with the results than the process:

1. It inevitably occupies physical space for as long as it exists.

2. It is trapped in a format that cannot be (reliably) converted to electronic text.

3. As a corollary, it is not searchable by machine, so I'd argue it's not quickly searchable on any large scale.

4. As another corollary, it cannot be made accessible to people who can't read written text (e.g. visually impaired people), at least not without the manual effort of retyping it.

If you're writing just to capture your own thoughts, and the only intended reader is you, and you have the space for it, I suppose I can't object to it without getting into a discussion about individualism versus collectivism. But handwriting has absolutely no attractions for me.

[fogus]

    If you're writing just to capture your 
    own thoughts, and the only intended 
    reader is you

Isn't that what we're talking about here? I don't write notes to put on display. I write notes to help in my personal understanding. The very act of writing some things down helps to crystallize them in my own mind. I rarely go back and look over what I've written. However, in the rare case that I do I've devised an indexing system that allows me to find a given note on a given topic fairly quickly. The whole process of writing, indexing and occasional look up is a process meant (and effective for me) in gaining understanding. I work best with handwritten notes, you do not. There is no glorification happening here.

[telemachos]

Unlike fogus, I am trying to glorify writing by hand in some contexts at least. (The proviso is important: I don't think that writing by hand is always better.)

I believe that writing by hand helps me to think better and write better, precisely because it's slower. (There's probably also something about me liking the specific physical feedback, but I would be the first to admit that's probably idiosyncratic and learned rather than universal.)

As for all the virtues of typed text that you mention, I agree. If you look at my process from above, I typed up what I had handwritten earlier. But even though this means some obvious duplication of effort, the net outcome was worth it for me (and still is).

No doubt people vary and all that, but I think writing by hand is vastly underrated nowadays. I stand by that.

[adrianhoward]

For me it seems to get me in a different mode of thinking. I tend to find it helps me unblock if I get stuck writing/coding/thinking if I switch from keyboard to pen, or from pen to keyboard. Writing with a pen forces me to slow down - and sometimes that's a good thing.

And there are also the non-textual things you can do with paper. I draw and sketch a lot.

[shrikant]

Hidden point #5 for me: it always cost me points on essay-type answers in any tests I took through all my years of school.

I could literally have written the same answer as someone else and they'd get a 10/10, while I'd get a 8/10 because the teacher would claim to struggle to read what I'd written. (This may or may not be true, but that's beside the point.)

Fuck that.

[pnathan]

Handwriting and penmanship is somewhat of an art form.

It's a different headspace than churning out writing on an editor.

[snowwrestler]

Handwriting is way too slow for me. I lose half my best thoughts while waiting for my hand to catch up. I much prefer to write the first draft on a computer, get it all down ASAP, then read and edit on paper. That's when I need space and time to be thoughtful.

[zeckalpha]

Could it be that you are thinking faster when you are handwriting?

[telemachos]

s/callous/callus/ # damn brain-fart

Things like this really make me wish I could edit HN posts without a time limit.