Exam period in university is a time when I have to write a lot, and it feels awkward for me. Not the exams themselves per se – that‘s a story in itself – but the physical act of writing with pen and paper. Seldom, if ever, do I resort to writing on physical material. I mostly type on my netbook, or if have to make a quick note then I bash it out as a draft text message on my cellphone. I never was the type to jot down appointments in a notebook; I meticulously log upcoming and regular events on an online calendar instead so that I can access it anywhere.
Unlike other students, especially at NTU Singapore, I never print out lecture notes. Instead, I prefer to annotate PDFs using comments, drawing tools et al that PDF readers have. This, to me, is less hassle than having to print out stacks of printing notes, remembering which ones to carry on which day to which lecture, marking key points using a highlighter…only to find mere weeks before an exam that I can’t find a particular set of notes.
(This is why I love my netbook. It is light – just about one kilogram, excellent for carrying around – and it gives me 8 hours of battery life without using wifi, 5-6 hours if I do; that’s enough to last me a ‘working day’. Running Ubuntu it can boot-up in 30 seconds, but even with Windows 7 performance is not that bad except for the longer start-up time. It’s perfect for the way I live.)
For tutorial sessions I click pictures of solutions put up on the projection screen with my cellphone or digital camera and tag them by subject when I import them in to my photo manager software; this gives me an archive of tutorial sessions that I can browse through by both subject and time. I am the type of student whom e-learning departments in universities use as model students when pitching for funding for their e-learning projects.
So when I say I feel odd writing during exams, it feels odd. Since exams come, say, once in every six months you can imagine how long I go before lifting a pen. When I have to sign receipts for card transactions, I find it a struggle to sign my own name properly. This atrophy of ‘writing’ muscles (fair to call it that?) is so bad that I need to start writing on paper at least two weeks before exams to get myself habituated. The first 2-3 days are the worst; it’s like learning to write for the first time.
Here’s the thing: I love ‘writing’, in its meaning of ‘creating text’, and I do lots of it. Obviously, not as much these days on this blog, but I’m constantly ‘write-typing’ for my private blog and for personal fiction-writing projects. I have tried to do both of these activities on paper – maintaining a (physical) diary or writing short stories / scripts on paper – and every time I have walked away frustrated. Because I don’t write a lot, I am slow at it. When I write on paper, I constantly find myself lagging behind what I’m thinking I want to write now, and this irks me. I don’t face the same issue on a text editor because I can touch type comfortably at a fast rate. (I’m not going to go into a discussion on how it’s easier to edit on a computer etc because those are self-evident.)
What I am curious about, though, is whether I have developed a preference for typing because my handwriting is bad, and, whether there is any correlation between people who have ‘good’ handwriting and prefer to write on paper as opposed to people who don’t and thus gravitate towards typing. Now, not writing for long periods affects my handwriting negatively as I have seen, but it is only making a bad thing worse. Ever since middle school my teachers have been railing at me to improve it; one particular teacher even made me do cursive writing workbooks used by primary school kids because she got fed up of trying to decipher my assignment submissions.
This is just a hunch, so to get some sort of preliminary validation I asked Aditya whether he: a) owned a Moleskine b) had a good handwriting. I asked the first because I vaguely remember him mentioning it once on Twitter. Someone who owns a Moleskine surely has to be big on wanting to write on paper, and probably does so frequently as the ‘features’ of the ‘Moleskine form-factor’ – hardbound or sturdy softbound cover, elastic band to retain loose page leaves, stitched binding for durability, etc – are designed for rough or ‘mobile’ usage rather than sitting on a desk.
He replied yes to both, but as a counter-argument mentioned that Ernest Hemingway had bad handwriting even though he wrote a lot. (Hemingway was also known to be a Moleskine user.) In my opinion, this example doesn’t disprove my hypothesis – and may actually strengthen it. In Hemingway’s time, writing on paper was the only realistic option if you wanted to record thoughts on the move. Typewriters were an instrument where you sat down at a desk to type out drafts or final versions, not to record everyday musings. You certainly couldn’t – rather, wouldn’t – want to carry a typewriter around in your knapsack. You didn’t have a choice. Regardless of how legible your handwriting was, hand-writing was the quicker and more convenient option. Is that true now, though? I realise the first part of this blog post might have been tedious to read through but I did it for a reason: I wanted to illustrate how it was possible – though certainly not by all – to live divorced from paper.
Herein lies the conundrum: given the choice of different writing mediums, do people with better handwriting prefer pen and paper, even though they may be touch-typists with high typing speeds? Aditya is but one example who conforms to this hypothesis; I have other friends who do too. What I have never seen, at least within my circle of friends and acquaintances who write a lot, is someone who has bad handwriting and still prefers paper. I am restricting this to people who like writing, because people who don’t need to record considerable lengths of text will probably use whatever medium they feel more comfortable with.
(Not related but another thing I’ve noticed: most of the people I know who match this hypothesis prefer to use a pencil or an old-school fountain ink pen – rather than a ballpoint pen – almost always ‘out of personal preference’ rather than any practical considerations. I think this is because they enjoy the stimuli these instruments provide – the distinct scratching noises, the physical feedback – that is often missing when using a ballpoint. Maybe it has something to do with ‘charm’, as ballpoints could be seen as ‘practical’ instruments whereas pencils / ink pens are for ‘pleasure’; the same way book-lovers keep on harping about that goddamned ‘smell’ as a charm factor.)
Anyone willing to prove or disprove the hypothesis, with facts or examples you know of?
Addendum: By ‘good’ handwriting I mean really good handwriting. People with average handwriting swing both ways. ‘Bad’ means really bad – I usually write about 100 words on an A4-size sheet of paper; it’s that messed up.
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I am in Cambodia now, and over the next two weeks I plan to also visit Thailand (and Laos, if I can fit it in). Unlike my previous trips to other countries which usually were weekend getaways, this is a trip where my itinerary has a significant amount of ‘unplanned’ time, making it all the more important for my own satisfaction that I record what happens during my journey. When I’m travelling I do not always have access to power sockets (or enough of them) to charge up my cellphone-netbook-camera triad; this is okay for shorter trips as I can keep at least two of three of my devices charged to record my experiences. This time, however, I do not have the same luxuries, and not just out of necessity but other reasons that I will talk about later, I wanted to keep a notebook with me.
I have had Moleskine cravings earlier but not until now did I follow through on it and seriously went looking to buy one. I did find a rack of Moleskines at the bookstore, but I balked at the price. At about S$30, the Moleskines are half the price of a plane ticket that could fly my to some other part of Asia – and about three times the price of similar offerings. I eventually bought a ZeniTouch journal – sounds like a Korean smartphone but the packaging assures me that it is a highly regarded Swiss journal brand. Whatever. Clearly, in a Mac vs PC ad I’d play the PC guy.
I have written ten pages in the journal, with a lot of oh-boy-what-do-write-here-now doodles, but I think I’m getting the hang of this, and actually enjoying it. I don’t think this will improve my handwriting or that I will ever seriously switch to paper, but as a ‘staging’ medium where I make quick notes on the move and them flesh them out on a computer I think this is going to work out great.
If it doesn’t work out, I can always use it as a prop to appear pensive and pretentious at cafes.
