There is something about typing on a computer that I find distasteful. The precision of it. The ability to remove any mistakes made and correct the sentence construction with a few clicks and the touch of a button - only the slightest trace remaining in the systems memory and your own. It is so clinical, so precise – it feels as if one of the most fundamental human aspects of writing has been removed: that extra dimension found in handwriting.
By typing your text, everything may be completely legible - but what of the other dimensions to writing? A handwritten piece communicates far more to the reader than simply the ideas conveyed through the words. The writer's handwriting style can often tell you much about their character, and their mood when they were writing. You can tell whether the writing was written in a hurry. You can tell whether the writer was scrambling to keep up with a train of thought that was struggling to stay confined to the railway. See what his intent was through the legibility of the piece - is every letter carefully formed and every piece of punctuation perfectly inserted so that his message could be readable for the largest possibly audience? Or does he write in a way which suggests that he doesn't care much if anyone reads the piece or not? Perhaps he was angry, and the pen comes close to breaking through the paper in parts.
I change my writing tools depending on my intent. Notes and reminders are hastily scribbled across whatever I can find – I have no less than 3 notepads open around my room, ready to jot down whatever comes to mind. For more complex ideas, I tend to use pen and paper again, but I take care with what I write – forcing myself to slow down my writing so that I can develop my idea further even as I write it. For letters, I tend to take up a calligraphy pen to demonstrate to the recipient that I put some time, thought and effort into what I was writing.
What all of this says about me and my character is up to you, the reader. This node was drafted on paper and rewritten into a word processor before eventually being copied and formatted for E2. I am not a luddite, new technology is something which I love and enjoy working with. I just thought I might share with the community some thoughts that occurred to me. Through writing down these thoughts as they occur to us, we not only develop them further, we crystallize them in our mind so that they remain, even if we choose to delete the mistakes we make.