Sarah's handwriting
When people find out that I draft all my manuscripts by hand, they often ask oddly obsessive questions about my handwriting. The story is a fairly simple one:
First grade
When I was in first grade, I learned to print.
One of my earliest diary entries was entertainingly prescient in showing what excited me most in life.
One of my earliest diary entries was entertainingly prescient in showing what excited me most in life.
When I was in third grade, public schools still taught a variant of Spencerian script, which had been the standard American cursive since the nineteenth-century. (After the conclusion of the cursive unit in my third-grade class, any paper submitted in print received an automatic "F.") This has been my handwriting ever since, and I like to think it's improved over the years. I've always been proud of it.
Me in third grade
An assignment showing my handwriting in third grade.
My handwriting at age 14.
Age 16
Age 16. (We'd been asked to write a story including a given list of homophones, which are underlined.)
Rough draft of a piece I wrote for Vox in 2015.
Manuscript pages for my fiction series:
Manuscript pages for First Wheel in Town
Manuscript pages for Love Will Find A Wheel
Manuscript pages for A Rapping At The Door
Manuscript pages for Delivery Delayed
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Manuscript pages for A Trip and a Tumble
Manuscript pages for Three Women Awheel
There have been some really interesting studies done into the effects of writing vs. typing in memory as well as production. The way we interact with words actually affects our use of language. Read more in these articles:
"Recall mode and recency in immediate serial recall: Computer users beware!" Catherine G. Penney and Penny Ann Blackwood Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 1989, 27 (6) 545-547.
"Performance amplification and process restructuring in computer-based writing" by Ronald T. Kellogg and Suzanne Mueller International Journal of Man-Machine Studies. 1993. pp. 33-49.
"Influence of Typing Skill on Pause-Execution Cycles in Written Composition." Rui Alexandre Alves, Sao Luis Castro, Liliana de Sousa and Sven Stromqvist. Writing and Cognition: Research and Application (Studies in Writing. Vol. 20, pp. 55-65). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
"A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop" Cindi May. Scientific American. June 3, 2014. Permanent Address: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret-don-t-take-notes-with-a-laptop/
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