Putting Pen to Paper

It’s official. I can type faster than I can write. It’s not surprising, I hardly ever write anything these days, as long as I have my laptop I’m jiggy. Thing is, I think it’s quite sad. I opened my journal today and realised I hadn’t written in it in over two weeks! There was a time I was in that book every single day, but I’ve noticed that increasingly, I can’t be bothered. Yet here I am churning out emails, blog posts, tweets and scribbling nonsense all over the web because I somehow see it as easier than sitting down to put my pen to paper.

I used to love writing, I still do, but typing and writing are really not the same thing. It isn’t just about thinking and imagination, there is a lot to be said for picking up a blank piece of paper and filling it with words. I’m a product of a primary school education in Spain at a time when they taught you to write joined up and it used to be a pleasure to me to see my writing on a page. I worked hard to develop the fanciest, curviest script you’d seen. Only to get to 15 in England and be told by my teachers that I could fail my GCSEs because the examiners would not be able to read my writing! Cheek!

So I had to learn how to write quickly in capitals (easier for me than separating my letters), and that was the beginning of the end. My poor mother felt I went from unreadable to breaking strict grammar rules by having everything uppercase. My defence was always you get one or the other, one passes one fails! It didn’t matter anyway, from college onwards everything was word-processed and electronic.

I had to take a moment when I realised a couple of years ago that even I was struggling to read my own joined up handwriting. When you get used to not having to read your own writing for anything useful, well you get unfamiliar with it. So my journal, when I picked it up two years ago was a way for me to write, brain dump and get therapy on the cheap! When I read some old entries, I have to kinda squint to try and figure out a word here and there, but I’m trying!

I’ve recently dumped my Palm Pilot for a good old fashioned paper organiser. It doesn’t crash, run out of battery, doesn’t need time to get going, and I can’t accidentally delete anything in it. Sometimes going back is the best way to go forward as my diary management was seriously suffering! I’m also going to re-dedicate myself to making time for my journal. I’ll definitely have to practice reading my own writing, otherwise that ‘one day maybe’ book of all my experiences is gonna be pure fiction!

That’s my handwriting in the pic, it’s part of a handwriting meme that has been around for a while now, but it’s an enlightening one, they say your writing says so much about you. So I’m tagging all of you who are active in the blogsphere. You’re such prolific bloggers, but what does your handwriting look like?

The Rules:

1. Choose a pangram of your liking, the most common being (“The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” )

2. Write it on a piece of paper and sign it with your blog name or online handle.

3. Take a picture and post it to the flickr group, your blog, myspace, facebook or all of them.

4. Link back or trackback to this post. (http://blog.logtar.com/2008/01/27/handwriting-meme-redux/)

5. Tag five people (I’ve clearly taken a liberty here!).