Does technology help you write?

Yes, very much so. I’ve never been good at writing by hand. I’m left-handed and I have a hard time writing without resting my hand on the paper so that it travels across whatever I’ve just written. Unless I have super-fast drying ink, it leaves a smudged mess on paper and a hand covered in ink. I can’t write on chalk or dry erase boards for this reason, at least, not well.

I hate writing by hand. One of my first jobs was a totally antiquated in the technology department. We didn’t have a credit card swipe machine where you just ring up a purchase lickety-split; we did it old school with charge slips. To be able to read the bottom copy, you had to press down with the pen really hard. It became a habit, so now whenever I write with a pen or pencil, I have a death grip on it so that my fingers go white and I leave an imprint on the table, carbon copies or not. Since I don’t write by hand anymore if at all possible, whenever I do, my ink-covered hand hurts after a while.

Besides the ink problem and the death grip, there’s also the fact that I type a thousand times faster than I write, or maybe only a hundred. Whatever the quantifiable measure, I feel confident in saying faster. I type much faster than I write by hand. This allows the nonsense to come out of my brain and into a written form with greater haste, thereby allowing me to spew it forth into the world with ease like a drunken frat boy.

Plus, spell check. Typically, when I write on a computer, I don’t pay attention to typos. I go back and fix them later. It’s awfully hard to do that when you hand write something. Then again, due to the breakneck speed of my handwriting, I don’t make as many typos, so it’s a wash.

I have a terrible habit of awkward sentence phrasing. I add unnecessary words and repeat things that don’t need repeating. With a computer, I can move things around, delete or add words and even whole paragraphs easily.

If I’m unsure of a word’s usage, I can look it up in a matter of seconds with the handy dictionary on my computer. I can find alternative meanings, synonyms and antonyms. It barely impedes the process of writing at all.

I suppose the main thing that the computer does for me is that it allows me to write uninhibited. I can just let the words come and worry about the rest later. Almost as fast as I think them, I can write them down. I can move them around. If I had to, I could make do with an old-fashioned typewriter. I’d just have to type a lot slower, and I’d have to have scissors and glue to rearrange things. It would certainly slow me down, which might not be a bad thing, depending on how much you like nonsense.