Thoughts on Writing the Old Fashioned Way
I'm starting to develop a love affair with legal pads and those extremely inky, smooth-writing pens that leave marks all over your hands. There's something really cool about writing in longhand which I've been missing since I started writing primarily on computers in fourth grade. Words on a computer screen are nothing but pixels - the ideas behind them can be really strong, but the words themselves feel extremely transient because they're basically just light. They can be made to disappear in a few keystrokes, if you're so inclined. Words written on paper, on the other hand, have a weight and permanence that you don't get from a computer screen. They're a bitch to edit - there's so many crossed-out words on my health care midterm that it feels like a good 20% of it is mistakes - but there's a romanticism to them, even though it's just a midterm, that I'm going to miss when I transfer the words to a computer file to send. There's something about the physical act of writing that makes ideas start flowing as well - occasionally it's unfortunate because my hand doesn't keep up too well so my handwriting's hard to read, but I think I've written more in bits and pieces over the last few hours in longhand than I would have sitting at a computer. But I think the only reason this worked is that I'm writing about something (health disparities) that I know a lot about and can talk about basically from memory, with a few exceptions like "health disparities exist among black and Latino populations* [statistic about diabetes and cardiovascular disease]"; if I'm writing about something I don't know too much about, like water pricing or college requirements, I need to be on a computer anyway to research it so I might as well kill two birds with one stone and write it on the computer.