Pen vs. Keyboard?

Could the pen and the keyboard produce different kinds of writing? I want to explore a few ideas on how they might.

Flow

When you write by hand your words flow in one direction only: forward. It’s hard to go back in time and start over. Nor can you easily insert text in the middle of paragraphs already committed to paper. But handwriting isn’t linear writing. The pen does not care about line breaks. It requires no bothersome change of mode to suddenly scribble a diagram or markup with arrows, squiggles and scores.

Pain

But writing by hand is slow, particularly if you can touch type. Using a pen hurts. Just writing these very words makes my fingers feel like they’ve spent four hours losing a game of chicken with a mousetrap. The effort and time that goes into handwriting makes it scarce; its production is very finite. An economist might say that the handwritten word is more expensive than the typed word.

Brush

With a pen the writer forms words in the same way that an artist forms an image. The primal handwritten form is not the word but the letter. Words are constructed by the spilling of instances of letter archetypes on a page in a certain order. In both this respect and that of the physical effort of writing the pen is closer to a painter’s brush than a typists keyboard. This is important because handwriting forces the writer to have a direct relationship with the letter.

The pitiless eye of the writer

Typing is different. Against the pen the keyboard is a low entropy device because the writer needs to make much less effort to form letters. A typed letter is identical to another of its kind. The writer doesn’t really need to care about them. This shifts the emphasis of his relationship from the letter to the word.

I’ll be naughty and anthropomorphise that new relationship. It’s just the sort of psychopathic revenge-lust you’d expect between an empty-hearted narcissistic bastard (you, dear reader) and a suicidal yet exquisite nymph with an infinite number of promiscuous sisters. For words can be thrown away and replaced with ease since so little effort went into their creation and perfection. Words wait for death on the screen, exposed to the pitiless eye of the writer and his porky pinky on DELETE.

Cut, paste, delete and undo may have had as big an effect on writing as the development of the alphabet and the drying of vellum. We may restructure at will. Whole sections of text may be reordered or rewritten without need of destroying the page in the same way as would be necessary to change a handwritten document. Typing allows us to experiment, to find what sounds best without needing to get it right first time. Typing lets us iterate.

Better ideas

My handwriting is closer to my spoken language than my typing. I tend to waffle and labour my points but I generate better ideas in ink than in pixels. While typing I feel less creative but more precise. I come up with better structures, more accurate descriptions and a sense of how the document flows as an argument. Your mileage may vary.

Handwriting has too many advantages to die. My writing has improved since I introduced it back into my workflow, drafting by hand before typing up. Taking advantage of both pen and key doubles the writing. But it produces better work.