On one hand (heh) there’s apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren’t typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful.
On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as… intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it’s all just fetishizing living a more analogue life.
It actually makes the techbro in me think there’s something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you do choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable.
I suppose that’s actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there will just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again.
…Meanwhile I’m pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That’s sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I’m finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don’t get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I’d get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things.
TL;DR someone who’s bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal
I find handwriting also lets me better organize my thoughts and allow me to practise and develop my reading and writing skills in the initial stages. Writing makes it easier to organize or make edits as I rewrite everything when I move it to my pc. It just adds less steps to the whole process because I can properly focus on making my first edit and rework everything. It also makes it easier for me to bring around to other people when I see them. I find with a digital copy, most people just press spellcheck and be done with it instead of commenting on how and why I phrase certain sentences and which words might better communicate my ideas. I’m also a bit overwhelmed sometimes when I go through my digital documents that I end up just chipping away at the editing rather than be able to focus on it.
For most people hand cramps are caused by using the wrong/bad tool and bad body ergonomics and awareness. After I’ve upgraded to better pencils and pens, I’ve had to use way less force to use which mitigated some of the cramping. The rest of it was just me using only my wrists and straining my fingers to write which is entirely incorrect.
I’ve also tried to go digital for note taking but I find I rarely ever did it properly and also rarely reviewed. I also ended up waiting way longer for the apps to load than needed for such short and simple notes. Now I only ever add events into my calender, the rest I just write down on a piece of paper whenever possible.