On Writing by Hand (Part 1)
Don't disqualify the dying art of handwriting. It might be one of the secret weapons of creativity and thinking.
“Every writer, no matter how technologically advanced, should learn how to write with pen and ink. There is a visceral connection between hand and eye that calligraphy brings out.”
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Studies have shown a correlation between writing by hand and improved learning. Interestingly, the effect appears amplified when one writes in cursive instead of typed characters. Physically connecting letters or strokes on a page seems intimately intertwined with acquiring literacy.
Slowing Down
One of the blessings in disguise of handwriting that I repeatedly hear thinkers referring to is the reduced speed of transferring information from the brain to the paper.
This artificial speed bump appears to benefit the quality of the information captured and how our thoughts, which we thought made sense in our head but were borderline incoherent, crystallise into structured narratives1.
One of the benefits of deliberately reduced speed is that your mind can beat around the topic as it waits for your hand to catch up.
When I was practising to get my driver’s license, the instructor was mindful of my speed control. He wanted his pupil to develop the foot-to-speedometer connection and muscle memory. He also tried to imitate the examination setting as closely as possible. But, more importantly, he explained how crucial it was to slow down to allow your brain to correctly interpret many signals picked up by your biological sensors, such as your eyes and ears.
“As far as I am concerned”, he said, “you can drive at 200 kilometres per hour in a residential area if your brain can process that much that quickly.” Having experienced the adverse effects of precipitation when I was learning to play a musical instrument, I understood exactly what he meant. Habits are sticky. Our ego makes us speed things up, persisting bad ones. They’ll be more challenging to unlearn than if we got it right initially. That same ego makes us accelerate beyond the speed we can safely keep up with.
The famous experiment where a group was asked to raise a hand if they thought they were above-average drivers shows this ego kicking in. More than 60% of participants raised their hands. However, over 60% being above average is a mathematical contradiction. All it is that we tend to overestimate our abilities, which certainly extends to speed. In social psychology, this cognitive bias is called “illusory superiority”, but I think it’s safe to call it ego.
Optimising for Speed
Our speed of thinking is faster than the speed of reading or speaking, which, in turn, is speedier than that of typing. For most people, typing is quicker than handwriting, especially when one cares to write in a legible cursive font.
I heard that many writers use dictation as their primary input source. Some would use voice recognition, while others would speak it into the audio recorder and hire a freelancer to transcribe it. They’re trying to get as many characters written daily as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that. They know what they’re doing, and they’re optimising for speed.
I admit to having tried it a few times only to realise that it would turn into incoherent blobs of text I couldn’t even proofread by the end of the session. I also realised I couldn’t think that fast—at least not yet. This approach is not optimal at this stage of my writing evolution. Right now, my typing and thinking speeds are not too far apart. Therefore, typing is currently my go-to input method.
However, I also notice that when I’m typing at the speed of thought, it’s as if I’m running through the corridor in a straight line, unable to open any of its doors. This is a shame because these doors could unlock adjacent topics related to my current writing topic (see
).Alternatively, when writing by hand, my muscle memory does one part of the job, while my brain is a few seconds or minutes ahead. Because the brain gets bored while waiting, I couldn’t prevent it from “opening adjacent doors” even if I tried hard in such circumstances. Therefore, it’s not uncommon for me to write two things simultaneously: the very thing I’m writing and a list of thoughts my brain had while writing so I don’t forget about them. When I get to write these extras, new ideas emerge, and history repeats itself.
A Word of Warning
We’ve just discussed what going too fast feels like. But how slow is too slow? There’s a speed threshold below which you risk doing more harm than good. If you’re optimising for content output, going too slow can cause you to lose your thoughts because you can only keep so many in your mental buffer. If ideas occur faster than you can capture and you start losing some of them, you’re going too slow.
Speed variation is an excellent tool for many aspects of life besides writing. Your teachers and coaches asked you to slow down and focus for a reason. But you need to be your coach when it comes to picking up the pace that’s right for you at this very moment for this task.
Speed Modulation in Music
Creatives in this field must be careful when modulating the composition/recording process speed. This is especially true for the folks praising old-school and vintage tools. As inspiring and creativity-inducing as they are, some of them should remain a thing of the past and only be used in your studio as memorabilia solely for display, in my opinion.
One day, I decided to get myself a hardware sampler from the 80s, hoping to tap into creative possibilities such devices were unlocking for the giants of that era.
As always, I took a deep dive into the rabbit hole and chewed through more information that would be considered legal by creative productivity standards. After hunting down a particular piece of gear, I bought it with a pile of floppy disks upon which I would write a few sound libraries in archaic formats shared by like-minded maniacs on the internet. Although I knew that turning chunky dials with satisfying feedback, pressing buttons, and reading one option at a time on a blue-and-white 20-character-long calculator-like screen would provide that creativity-inducing speed bump, the speed of the floppy disk reader proved to make this tool unusable. I would search for a specific sound for the chord progression I had in mind but would have to wait several minutes for the sound library to load. By then, I would either forget the passage or, if the sounds weren’t right, would have to repeat the operation, progressively growing tired of turning my thumbs while waiting for the crackling floppy disk to do its part of the job. That was one notch too far for me, and I had to let it go and revert to a more modern, faster way of manipulating sounds.
The Dangers of Writing by Hand
Being a big fan of the experience of putting a luxury pen nib on high-quality paper, I often notice how I inadvertently slide into a calligraphy practice, which is not what you want when you’re in the process of capturing ideas. This sometimes resulted in me not remembering the content of what I had just written because the focus was on the stroke order, space consistency, and line variation. Speed it up a notch unless you’re trying to improve your handwriting, or else you’ll negate the benefit of opening adjacent doors, and many a stone will remain unturned.
Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening Up by Writing It Down, Third Edition: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. Guilford Publications.
Malik, you’ve summarised in one post what I’ve been writing across multiple posts…and you put it so succinctly.
The mental benefits that hand writing provides cannot be understated!