Theresa Gooda, South Downs NWP convener and secondary English teacher, writes about the value of writing slowly with a notebook and pen.

‘I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness.’

This appears on the first page of Barack Obama’s preface to A Promised Land, the recently-published memoir in which he has attempted an ‘honest rendering’ of his time in office as president of the USA.

It resonated with me straight away.

I too am a fan of the humble notebook and pen, and I encourage fellow writers at NWP meetings to join me in ‘physically’ writing, even while we are meeting virtually during lockdown. Some, of course, prefer technology: a laptop, or even tapping into a mobile phone, but I love the sound of writers writing together, the scratchy noise on paper.

I’m also convinced that there is something about the physical act of hand writing, the slowness of it, that makes my writing better. I’ve never been able to articulate quite why, but I think Barack is onto something - the illusion of ‘polish’ that typed words on screen bring can bring is problematic.

Part of that problem comes from the fact that writing, for me, is always exploratory in the first instance. Whatever kind of writing I am undertaking, whether it is poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction, academic or creative (and what, really, does ‘creative’ mean - all writing is surely this), my first marks on paper are a form of ‘working out’. I never know quite what’s in my head when I begin.

What makes writing particularly powerful as a mediator of knowing is, first the possibility it allows for the writer to make an extended, fully worked-out contribution, and second, because of its slower rate of production, its facilitation of a more reflective and self-critical stance (Wells, G. 2001. Action, Talk, and Text: Learning and Teaching through Inquiry. p186)

I came across Gordon Wells’ words while researching something entirely unrelated, but like Obama’s they rang true.

I worry that in our online teaching world we are physically writing less, even if we are typing and tapping away at a keyboard more.

As I plan my ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’ online lessons, I am forcing myself to find more and more opportunities to invite students to pick up a pen during the course of a session. The chat functions and sticky notes are all great for interaction, but ‘jotting down’ and ‘freewriting’ are important too. I’m also encouraging my students to write in longhand on first drafts and upload photographs of their draft work alongside the final draft to emphasise the sense of process that is easily lost at the moment; to avoid ‘too smooth a gloss’.

After all, if it’s good enough for Obama…