Hey friends,
Recently I've been reading The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen. I'm still less than 100 pages in, but it has already struck a chord. In chapter three, she discusses the experience and impact of writing by hand compared to using a keyboard.
There's a passage I underlined because it so beautifully sums up what I've been thinking and feeling recently. She writes, "
The pace of writing by hand, as with many embodied acts, is far slower than the tempo of tools that dominate modern life - the devices and algorithms that move at lightning speed, processing information and meeting our demands for instant gratification. The ease and efficiency of the keyboard trains us to move with efficiency and the more we use it, the more our habits of mind reflect that use.
It's a very similar sentiment to what Nicholas Carr conveys in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, where he discusses Friedrich Nietzsche's assessment of using a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball (an early typewriter) to type instead of writing by hand, and finds that his thoughts and prose have a more mechanical feel to them.
The Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. Src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansen_Writing_Ball
Extinction of Experience makes the case for handwriting (in Chapter 3 - the scope of the book is much broader, of course) better than I likely could in a short newsletter. But! I have thoughts to add. Obviously. That's why we're here, yes?
If you've been online in tech-oriented spaces recently, you've probably come across ads for a tool called WisprFlow. The premise is simple. Instead of using a mouse and keyboard, you just dictate your thoughts and what you're trying to achieve, and WisprFlow's LLM does the rest. It cleans up your umms and other filler words, and fills in the gaps of loose, disconnected thoughts, promising to maximize efficiency above and beyond what you can do with a keyboard.
Personally, I hate the concept.
Like so much of our culture, it optimizes for productivity and output to the extent that you don’t have to be involved in editing or refining your thoughts hardly at all. The LLM fills in the gaps as you go. Dictation technology isn’t new, and can be a great tool for accessibility, but when dictation becomes a prompt instead of a transcript, the critical thinking process breaks down.
It conflates the product with the process. Writing is not about having the final drafted manuscript in your possession. It’s about unearthing your thinking, making connections between disparate ideas, and conveying something about the world and your perspective. You do that by drafting. Thinking. Reading. Editing. Re-reading. Throwing out drafts and starting again.
One of my favorite quotes by Willa Cather is, "When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all."
The value is in the process, not the product.
Writing by hand slows you down. That's a feature - Not a deficiency. Our minds may be accustomed to jumping between things at a million miles an hour, but that doesn't mean it's optimized for doing so. Going slow and developing your thinking is a luxury, and it's at risk of being "optimized" out of existence in the modern workplace.
In defense of slowing down, I have written this newsletter by hand on my tablet. I'll clean it up, add links, and make my visual collage on my computer, but the font is coming from my scratchy handwriting. Feel free to read the original at some link I'll add on my computer.
Until next time,
Blake