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I hate the feel of writing on paper

Handwriting on screens also too slippery , unless you put matte screen protector , but that brings another issue : wearing pen nib down

As a lefty, handwriting can go away. I am 10x faster as a typer than I am a handwriter, and I do not welcome the hand cramp pains I remember from my school days of writing essays and furious notes, trying to keep up. As a millennial, most of my grade through high school was done on paper, and I despised it entirely.

About the only thing I enjoy about handwriting is drawing quick diagrams, which is something I just don't seem to ever find flexible enough in any piece of software. I've tried absolutely every single diagramming tool, and they either are too cumbersome, or too limited, to meet all my needs.

It's simply untenable if I expect anyone else to read it. When I was in school I even had a 504 plan to avoid handwriting assignments and used an alphasmart for a while.

I don't see choosing to handwrite inefficient or pretentious. I see it as something familiar that I enjoy because I have had a journal since my teens.

As a trained professional working with older adults, I also know that keeping up writing can help promote brain health. There has been plenty of research published on this, including that regular practice of reading and writing can help staff off onset of of dementia in older adults, so it's basically brain exercise.

That said, I write grants for work, narratives for our contracts and so forth, so I also appreciate that when under a time crunch I can bang out something fast on my keyboard after I have spent a little time drafting out initial ideas.

At the end of the day, I think a lot of this just depends on your views about writing in general (regardless of the tools you use); some people hate it no matter what they have to do on. Meanwhile, there are old gits like me that you have pry out of bookstores with a crowbar because after my scanning of the SciFi section, I get busy having too much fun snooping through the isles displaying leather journals and pots of fountain pen ink in goofy colours, and packs of stationary with cute designs. 😂

Pen or keyboard, it's all good.

I prefer to journal by hand, mainly because journaling on the computer feels unnatural somehow. But I can't write more than 1-2 pages before my hand cramps up.

it's great. i like fountain pens and write a lot by hand.

I like writing things by hand. I don't do it because of the supposed brain activation, but I genuinely like the feeling of writing. That's most of it, honestly.

On a more practical note, I find that I'd rather have more organized information in electronic format, but writing by hand is much simpler for quick notes - so I'll usually jot down stuff I need to last a few days, meeting notes and such, and I might type those things out in a tidier manner if I feel like the information warrants it, if it's something I might need to come back to in a few months or years.

While yes, I technically do type faster than I write by hand, when I'm taking notes of something, I usually mix sentences with quick sketches and diagrams - and I can do that much faster by hand than using some sketching software.

https://youtu.be/u6qxixgQJ4M?t=12

For me it's mostly the ease of it. I'm the type to get very bogged down by (perceived) steps, hurdles, and visual overstimulation. An illustration:

Notebook

• Find pen or pencil
• Find the page you need
• Go

Tablet/Etc

• Is it charged
• Specific pen only
• Keyboard needs pairing
• Is keyboard charged
• It wants to update now, awesome
• Turn it on, see ten unrelated apps --> forget what I'm doing
• App randomly decides it needs internet access
• Probably have to deal with syncing now
• etc etc
• (another 'me' problem: I get really hung up on trying to format things digitally, which takes time way from what I'm supposed to be doing)

Now, there are certainly benefits to writing things out digitally, especially when searchability is key. Any important info in any of my booklets that I might need to find later on gets typed up or entered into a spreadsheet where applicable. Not the most efficient way to do things, I suppose. 😅

In general though: I just like being able to look down and see a thing I've written, rather than needing to wake up a device, open a program, or otherwise fiddle with a screen, especially while multitasking.

I like writing and taking notes by hand. When I need to think something out I write it. I like this primarily because I can do things like add arrows, create bubbles, and create diagrams much easier and faster by hand than with a screen. I want to get an e-ink tablet at some point, but for now a paper and pencil/pen is cheaper.

I just like it. Writing with a fountain pen is much more HANDS ON than writing something down on a phone or (bad) laptop keyboards. Especially if your pen is higher quality. Although a nice mechanical keyboard can be quite nice (I like tactiles a lot).

The practical thing also is: If you keep your notes well organized, it can actually be much more accessible. I dunno, I have spent my entire life with PCs, but they feel "cluttered" so quickly and require so many revisions of organisation.

Having both is useful though, so I keep physical versions and scan them later to also have them digitally available AND not having to use those evil, evil printers who want me to buy more ink...

I'm 100% a "both" person.

I take notes on my phone, especially if it's something I'll need on-the-go (like a grocery list). But I also write a lot of physical notes with pen and paper.

Especially for things like a remodeling project on the house - I can scribble out my thought process as I go, small ammendments with measurements or whatever as needed, etc. I prefer writing notes by hand, but there's no one right answer. For me, anyway.

I'm learning another language, and writing by hand feels like the fastest way things get remembered in my mind. It makes the learning more...visceral, I am more engaged in things that happen instead of an audience passively absorbing and experiencing. And i think that that translates to other experiences because i love handwriting, i love the act of putting words onto paper and other medium.

Someone who engages the world another way - when your information is tied to the flow of characters instead of shaping the characters themselves, of course sees it differently. A visual artist who rarely types and puts down thought in sketches instead of words - will struggle to type their vision too when they would rather put down a series of images and just a minimum of words .

I find that it keeps me present to write by hand. I remember things better and I think it is due to the physical motion. I got through tech school with a top score by taking handwritten notes in class and then copying them over at home. I used to journal by hand, but it hurts my wrist. I still take handwritten notes on classes and for to-do lists. I carry a little journal. But the bulk of my writing is done online.

Writing by hand definitely helps me a lot with learning and remembering things. When taking exams in school I would picture my actual notes in my notebook to remember things. That's just how it works for me I guess. However now if i need to jot down quick notes like a grocery list or something I'll just do it on my phone. Personally I enjoy pens and pencils and I wish I had more reasons to write things but I'm definitely no writer and I'm not into journaling so really the only writing I do now is for language learning.

I hate writing by hand. Typing in Standard Notes gets synced to the "cloud" and also I get daily backups sent to my email. In addition, it's end-to-end encrypted (supposedly, though I'm not knowledgeable enough to audit the source code, although a quick internet search doesn't reveal any scandals, and it has been recommended by many internet users and privacytools.io), and I can send the encrypted backups to multiple cloud services on the internet so the risk of losing my writings are almost impossible, unless there's a nuclear war. Honestly, I don't see why people still enjoy writing by hand, its just too much work for my hands to deal with. But each to their own, I guess. If you have writing on paper, and you don't want to lose it, you'd have to scan or take pictures of every page you want to backup, and you better have great handwriting or else you wouldn't be able to use OCR on it to make the text searchable.

This year I started keeping a shitty little notebook I don't care about losing or damaging in my pocket with a cheap fountain pen. I use it whenever the need or desire takes me, which might be every day for a week, or not at all for a month. I use it to stabilize tables sometimes, or just to flip through if I want to do something with my hands. I've used to to keep score in boardgames, or to write down my thoughts and feelings. I really love it.

I'm a software engineer of about 8 years and I think the longer time goes on the more I want to be disconnected from a screen in my free time. I love coding and gaming and scrolling Kbin on my phone, but sometimes it's so nice to just put all that down, take a walk, and write stuff on real paper. Doesn't need to be anything more than that. Not for me, anyways

I journal and take notes regularly by hand and have written novel-length manuscripts in the last couple of years by hand. I prefer using fountain pens or else my hand cramps up (and using anything else for that amount of writing can get a bit wasteful). I don't know if it's better for my memory, but I prefer it for other reasons.

My process is to write a first draft by hand to minimize digital distractions. I take my notebook and pen somewhere without internet, and leave my laptop and phone behind. Then, I type it up, and this is a sort of "natural" 2nd draft process, as I obviously make smaller or larger edits as I'm re-reading my own work.

My mom still has notebooks from when she was in high school. Digital amnesia means I don't have any of my high school and college homework anymore. I developed this system because realized I was putting a lot of effort into managing digital backups of all of my drafts and shit when simple folders and stacks of paper would do fine. But really, I mostly do it because I have ADHD, and using computers to write longform drafts is difficult because they are highly distracting devices. Typewriters and notebooks that only do one thing make things more straightforward for me. So, I get why most people don't approach things this way in 2023.