Typers of the world, unite!

Alright, I’m rebelling and I'm throwing it out here because I'd like feedback. I understand that there’s probably a very good reason that Cameron wants us to write longhand and I’m sure it’s a valid, well considered reason. However, she cannot have it both ways with me. She is asking us to write unedited pieces and I’m simply not fast enough at writing longhand in order to do that. That bears quite a bit more explanation.

Typing is an incredibly fast mode for me compared to longhand. Every typing test I’ve taken puts my WPM at somewhere in the neighborhood of 70-80. No, I’m not bragging, I’m sure there are a lot of people reading this who can move faster than that. However, I write longhand at what I would estimate to be about 30-40 WPM. I could probably make it up to 50, but you’d have to have several linguistics specialists standing by as both my handwriting and my syntax break down into a form best described as “Chris Martin pretending to be intoxicated.” It’s not a pretty sight.

Now, typing at the speed I do, my fingers and thus the words on the screen move at the same rate my thoughts do. Well, usually, that’s obviously barring such things as having to backspace because the idiot that designed my laptop keyboard decided it’d be a good idea to make the backspace key hide itself as far as possible from my finger. Also, mousepads are a fun little torture when you have the bad habit of letting your palms touch the spot in front of the keyboard. But I digress, as I’m often reminded by my wife. The point is, when I type, I don’t self-edit because I don’t allow my thoughts enough time between formation and recording for this to happen. Longhand, however, I always find myself trailing my head by about two sentences. So, things get weird as I’m sucked into a form of multitasking that probably has Torquemada howling at the unfairness of not thinking of it himself. I’m simultaneously trying to juggle writing whatever sentence is forming in my head, recording the sentence I just wrote, and editing the sentence that formed before the one I’m writing and after the one I’m recording. In other words, if I had been writing this longhand, I would have been scribbling the sentence starting with “Longhand, however…”, composing the sentence about juggling, and trying to remember how to spell Torquemada for the one in the middle. This whole bit actually probably wouldn’t exist.

That leads me to the better way to put it. Longhand robs me of my voice. When writing longhand, the internal professor kicks in and he’s a stodgy old cuss. He doesn’t like flash, he doesn’t like emotion, he doesn’t like pizazz. He feels jokes have no place in writing for an academic environment and Pythonesque silliness should only be even hinted at when one is writing an analysis of Python. Long story short, he hates everything about the kind of writing that I am most comfortable with and most happy doing. The funny thing is I listened to the old fart because that’s what I thought I had to do for A’s. I had this ideal of the academic voice in my mind and it brooked no personality. The fact is that the internal professor, stuffy jerk that he is, is remarkably comfortable making a spectacle out of himself until he’s listened to. I don’t always take his advice, but the internal argument robs me of words as it did yesterday when I completely lost a train of thought because I was busily trying to determine whether to use “its” or “it’s” in a sentence three lines out ahead of what I was writing.

I’m absolutely not saying that I can’t write longhand. I’m not even saying that I can’t write well in longhand. I’m just not able to move my hand fast enough to keep up with my thoughts and that drives me nuts.