This morning, my coworker was having a little trouble.
“I swear, you’ll never fail to screw me up if you ask me to write an ampersand,” she muttered, showing me the piece of paper she was working on. We both laughed about it together, I noting that my attempts usually looked like I was just handwriting the letter ‘S’ backwards.
Being someone who primarily does most of my writing, whether it’s emails, fictional stories, news articles, or columns like this one, on the computer (I even have an app that sends some of my texts to my laptop so I can avoid using the touchpad), I tend to forget about my handwriting.
It’s not that I’m bad at handwriting exactly. I think I was probably one of the first in my Grade 3 class to be allowed to handwrite my notes, which was a pretty big deal. Winners of this prestigious honour would have a certificate proudly displayed on the wall and would be given the illustrious blue pen in order to take notes.
Keep in mind, however, that this was a short-lived honour. I mean, for one thing, we could only use blue pen (or red pen if we were underlining), not the obviously cooler black pen or any other vibrant colours, which meant the gel pens I bought at the book fair were basically useless. Another problem was the fact that the school didn’t have the budget for any fancy pens, and so the pens we received were blocky contraptions with edges that dug into fingers and left me unwilling to write after a single sentence.
Also leaving me less than enthusiastic was the fact that, being a southpaw, my writing became smudged using a pen, and also left my left hand dyed with ink that was much harder to clean off than graphite from a pencil.
I did my best to deal with these problems, but as I entered high school and note taking became even more common, I was left with another problem: my speed. I don’t write very fast when I’m handwriting. People say I have very nice, neat handwriting, but that’s only if I’m taking my time meticulously forming the little loops and curls. If I’m expected to write fast, my cursive becomes unpredictable and near unreadable, slanting so much to one side it’s practically horizontal.
Once I reached college, I stubbornly brought my laptop to every class, as my typing was much quicker and neater. For the five years I was taking college classes, almost every note I had was on a laptop. I would even retype notes from my textbook readings so I could read them clearly.
There were only two classes I couldn’t use my laptop reliably in, one being Japanese, where everyone was just as slowly tracing out kanji and hiragana. Precision in writing seems to be an art in that language, when the order of a pen’s strokes seems to be the difference between ‘four’ and ‘death’ (no, I’m not kidding, four and death are both pronounced ‘shi’ and the only way to tell the difference is by reading the kanji).
The second class was math, and I know I definitely fumbled through my statistics class because the professor would skip quickly past a slide in his slideshow presentation and I wasn’t done taking notes. Still, I made it through my college life happily with my laptop, and I thought that being a reporter would just mean more of the same.
That is unfortunately not always the case. I still have to take notes during interviews, which certainly makes me feel like a failure. I try to combat the issue of speed by just taking jot notes and printing, but if the person I’m interviewing leans over to see my page, my childish printing that winds across the page and barely stays inside the lines probably doesn’t make a good impression.
Of course, I’m slow at printing too, and sometimes if I’m trying to take pictures and write during a show, it takes precision to manage both without the pictures turning out blurry or words missing. I have to ask people to repeat things occasionally as I’m still writing down the first part of what they said, and it makes me feel like I’m back in high school again, all desks turned to me as the teacher waits for the slowpoke writer to finish the notes so he can finally erase the blackboard.
Still, I think the job has made me write a little quicker and a little neater, which is certainly a plus. I can only hope that in the future, I can just think and let something else write the words for me. I don’t have so much ‘writer’s block’ but ‘writing utensil block,’ I suppose.
