Fishing for participles

I have a few of those Gregg-style notebooks in my cabinet, Mitch, yellowing with age.  I got them at a bargain sale decades ago, and they're pretty useless if you don't do shorthand.   Of course they could turn you into a Hemingway "short declarative sentences" writer.  But I do that.  Can do that.  Already.

Or you could turn them sideways and write really long sentences in short paragraphs.

Yeah, trying to use a stylus on a screen doesn't work for me, not for extended text.  It doesn't feel like writing.  I really should integrate the combination into my overall working habits, though.   The barrier used to be that the programs that interpret handwriting into type were laughably inefficient; you spent more time decoding them than you would have spent typing.  Is that still true?

I think that my brain, or one's brain, processes writing-by-hand differently than it does keyboarding.  It obviously uses different areas for the two processes.  Handwriting is primarily mediated by large arm muscles, rather than fingers – at least if you do it properly.  A lot of my MIT students wrote with little squidgy finger motions, and their handwriting was cramped and uncomfortable-looking.

Whatever gets the ideas across, though.  You could even make a case for bad handwriting as a cryptography scheme, if your handwriting is so bad that nobody else can read it!

(My father's handwriting was spectacularly bad, the cliché physician's prescription scrawl.   His secretary was the only person on the planet who could decipher it, and she followed him from Washington to Anchorage, and back to Washington.  Many years later, I found that shorthand was only one of her virtues.  But that's another story.)

I think one reason my handwriting is good is that my typing is not.  Before computers, that was a real handicap to professional writing.  But perhaps it made me write slowly.  Not a virtue in itself.  But careful writing is.  To dangle a verb seductively.  (An effective way to catch a carp.)

Back to work.

Joe