Last year, I went back to university after 30 years. It was an interesting course and I realised that one had lost the ability to focus on books for significant lengths of time. The learning was stimulating and assignments were done on my laptop and emailed to the professors.

At the end of the year came the exam that needed you to sit in a hall and write with your hand and a pen for three hours. I hadn’t written for years. Decades actually. It felt alien and difficult. Fingers ached and one struggled to stay legible.

Yet, something shifted. As you write and form the letters, perhaps you trigger different synapses in the brain, or perhaps you simply give yourself more time to think. You also stop relying on spell-check and read back what you have written to express ideas more cogently than while typing. The act of writing itself is one of creation. Your handwriting talks about you and reveals industry or laziness, precision and care versus slothful behaviour – and I realised it can be a powerful tool to create a better perception of the content. The careful crafting of letters also requires a skill very different from the hunt and peck of a laptop. It is one where we are creating a visual world as much as a literary one.

It allows you to process your thoughts as against just ‘blurting’ them out through a typed missive. Our screen addiction and the need for instantaneous response has made typing synonymous with this urgency. Writing, on the other hand, allows you to marshal your thoughts and create more meaningful and deeper expression.

Perhaps it’s time to reclaim ourselves from this tyranny of our keyboards – and start writing again.

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