HOW WRITING BY HAND MAKES IT REAL

Writing by hand—which I have my students do frequently both at home and in class—is a practice of patience and hope: allowing the time for thoughts to emerge from the haze of contemplation, to be drawn out. Authentic thinking is slow and occasionally silly or deadended. It is one of the great pleasures in life: to lose yourself in a trance of nebulous thinking, coldly unfolded logic, warmly free association.

You can change your thought by writing by hand, especially if you vary your mode: print, tiny, cursive, diagrammatic (arrows, boxing, hub-n-spoke), scrawl, neat, slow-downs, speed-ups, long pauses, lots of em dashes and parentheses. Most students have but one tool when they come to class: the bulleted list. By the end, they have 10 more techniques.

After an in-class handwritten brainstorm, I usually ask students to put their work away and read something related and discuss it in small groups before coming back to the handwritten page to look for the “Goldilocks” moments where they feel the words touched on something good (= a felt sense of a purpose or insight taking shape). Writing, as many scholars have shown, is a recursive activity, one that circles back, branches off, detours, more or less constantly involving the writer in a back-and-forth between big picture and small detail points of view. The final product of course never shows any of this circuitousness or the amount of effort that goes into listening to one's sentences to determine whether they can refined, a mindset that Verlyn Klinkenborg describes beautifully.