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Maddie Worsley

WRDS 1103

Malcolm C. Campbell

30 November 2022

Just Pen and Paper: The Differences Between Hand-Writing and Typing

“It is simple. Just put pen to paper.” These are the thoughts that ran through my head any

time we had writing assignments growing up. I would look over and see the other students racing

against the clock almost to get it finished. It felt as if they were writing novels compared to my

three-sentence paragraph. It was hard for me to fight the battle of comparison between others’

writing versus my own. This whole view shifted when laptops entered the picture.

Although I was never taught the “proper” way to type leading me to be one of the slower

typers in my classes, I felt more comfortable writing stories or essays on the computer. It was

easier to get rid of or erase the mistakes I made. If I did not like something I could just hit the

delete button and it was gone whereas when I would erase something with an eraser, the thoughts

I previously wrote down were still in the background. However, the same two thoughts still

popped into my head but were slightly different. “It is simple. Just start typing words on the

paper.”

Fast forward to the present day, I am now a freshman in college who has taken countless

writing-based classes throughout high school, and somehow I still find myself getting trapped in

these thoughts. But, a different thought crossed my mind when it came to writing. A light bulb

came on when exploring what kind of writing I prefer, by hand or typing. Every teacher I have

ever had always preferred us to write notes by hand but would have us type papers on the
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computer. This never made sense to me because the students, including myself, would have to

really study the information we would type in order to talk about their topics. Whenever it came

to the notes though, everyone knew what was taught and could have conversations about it. This

led to wanting to figure out how exactly the brain of an individual was affected when one writes

by hand over typing or vice versa. Was there a clear difference between the two and how

important is it to the human brain to actually write by hand?