You know what I discovered? The hand-written letter was a lot more profound than any email I ever wrote. The writing is much slower and leaves a lot of space to think about what one wants to say.
And you know what else? N and I were in a long-distance relationship for 2,5 years. Before the advent of email, for people of our social class this would have meant a rich epistolary tradition developing between us. Instead, all we have is a bunch of stilted emails.
A hand-written letter is so profound that it is almost scary.
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I don’t think, that for most people, typing is faster than handwriting. Certainly, I haven’t seen a lot of fluent typists. However, I think that with handwriting, it’s more personal since everyone has their own idiosyncratic ways of forming letters and words. There’s also a huge tactile element which isn’t present with typing.
I have reams and reams of emails and instant messenger conversations. Of course, most of them aren’t profound, but honestly I have a whole bunch of stilted letters too.
I wonder if people who didn’t grow up handwriting a great deal find that typing even stilts their writing. There’s something quite stilted and truncated within the emails and messages of men who hope to get someone from across the coasts or in another country to enter into a relationship with them.
“Hw r u? I like yr profile ” is not something that makes me want to respond to someone claiming to have advanced education. I think the real difference is between smartphones/tablets and other means of communication(laptops/desktops/typewriters/letters). There’s something inhibiting about an autocorrect function, especially on a smartphone.
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I type with one finger, so I’m definitely the slowest typist ever. But I don’t need to type any faster because in my research I need to think a lot and that happens much more slowly than any typing. Or writing.
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Interesting. I find that I need to get something on the page and then prune it or edit it. If I don’t write it, it stays undeveloped in my head no matter how many times I turn the idea over in my head. I have old pieces of writing where I can see that I stopped typing/writing mainly because I got tired of struggling with the typewriter.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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