1. Think time — When we take pen to page or finger or stylus to screen, the slower movements of our hand and fingers give us a few more seconds to gather our thoughts.
2. Short cuts — The time we spend writing by hand can make us less likely to ramble on; we’ll feel less wordy, especially if writer’s cramp sets in during the process.
3. Better focus — Armed with just a pen and a blank page, fewer visuals can distract you from writing.
4. Mindfulness — The act of hand writing can use more of our brain — including the right and left hemispheres — than typing and result in a more thoughtful piece. As quoted in Reader’s Digest, “‘Writing by hand is different from typing because it requires using strokes to create a letter, rather than just selecting the whole letter by touching a key,’ says Virginia Berninger, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. These finger movements activate large regions of the brain involved in thinking, memory, and language.”
5. Freedom — Lack of distractions, more time with the page, greater care in our wording, and use of our minds can unleash our creative spirits to take our writing to a deeper level, especially if we don’t write by hand often. A change of routine, such as a sunny day rest on a park bench writing with pen and notepad might be a great way to refresh your prose and stimulate a new perspective.
Quotes
“I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers. I like the slowness of writing by hand.” ~ Susan Sontag
“People complain that writing by hand is slow, but that can be good for thinking and creating. It slows us down to think and to contemplate and to revise and recast. Its physical presence can be a goad to completing tasks, whereas computer files can easily be hidden and thus forgotten.” ~ David Allen, Getting Things Done
Comments? Suggestions? Need help with your writing? Feel free to contact me.
Michelle Troutman
classywriting.com
