https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-brain-keyboard.html
As digital devices progressively replace pen and paper, taking notes by hand is becoming increasingly uncommon in schools and universities. Using a keyboard is recommended because it's often faster than writing by hand. However, the latter has been found to improve spelling accuracy and memory recall.
To find out if the process of forming letters by hand resulted in greater brain connectivity, researchers in Norway now investigated the underlying neural networks involved in both modes of writing.
"We show that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard," said Prof Audrey van der Meer, a brain researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and co-author of the study published in Frontiers in Psychology.
"Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning."
The researchers collected EEG data from 36 university students who were repeatedly prompted to either write or type a word that appeared on a screen. When writing, they used a digital pen to write in cursive directly on a touchscreen. When typing they used a single finger to press keys on a keyboard.
High-density EEGs, which measure electrical activity in the brain using 256 small sensors sewn in a net and placed over the head, were recorded for five seconds for every prompt.
Connectivity of different brain regions increased when participants wrote by hand, but not when they typed. "Our findings suggest that visual and movement information obtained through precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen contribute extensively to the brain's connectivity patterns that promote learning," van der Meer said.
Journal Reference:
F. R. (Ruud) Van der Weel and Audrey L. H. Van der Meer, Handwriting but not Typewriting Leads to Widespread Brain Connectivity: A High-Density EEG Study with Implications for the Classroom, Frontiers in Psychology (2024). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945
(Score: 4, Interesting) by YeaWhatevs on Saturday January 27 2024, @07:48PM (4 children)
Maybe this is news, but I tell my kids this all the time when taking notes. Doing it by hand simply lets you remember better. I suppose this means there is now a brain scan to back it up, which is cool, but let's be honest, we don't know enough about the brain to say the scan means anything, it is like all brain studies in that we can now visualize ... well something, but given what we know already, we assume it means we now have proof. Of course, without those previous results we would have no way to interpret what we see, which proves we're kust really excited about seeing something we knew all along.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 27 2024, @09:44PM (3 children)
>tell my kids this all the time when taking notes. Doing it by hand simply lets you remember better.
Yes, and no... as always it depends on circumstances.
I would agree, if you are "fluent in handwriting" and the act of recording thoughts on paper flows without distracting you from comprehending what is being presented, then: yes. Typing is, in my opinion, much easier than handwriting legible notes, so that degree of engagement is both good for focus and also for associative memory formation. On, quite literally, the other hand, if handwriting is not so easy for you, if you can't get everything down on paper as quickly as it is presented, or if it requires too much of your attention to do so, then the act of taking notes by hand becomes a distraction, you lose ability to pay attention - particularly if the material being presented is also complex / mentally challenging. Perhaps taking notes by keyboard would be better than simply trying to remember everything you have heard, perhaps not - I've never tried that comparison.
What I did try in higher math courses in University was a sort of unplanned partnership, wherein I would pay attention in class - hands still, just going along with the lecture, visualizing the things that were being presented, and even asking a decent question once in a while. Meanwhile, my unplanned partner was taking impeccable handwritten notes, complete with sketches of graphs and similar things as were presented on the chalkboard in lecture - something that paper is still easier to do on even as compared with dedicated art tablets I have used, but... she wasn't understanding what she was writing and the volume of material that was presented in each lecture was too much for either of us to "just get" in a single presentation.
So, we discovered that a 30 to 90 minute session soon after each lecture or two in which I would explain her notes to her was highly mutually beneficial. For me, having to explain the material such that she understood it was just enough to settle the concepts as more permanent memories for me - I never bothered to even take photocopies of the notes, teaching her was enough studying for me, and of course for her by the end of the session she understood her notes well enough to re-study them herself before the exams - we both got A or A+ marks in every class we did this in. It was so successful the first time we scheduled most difficult classes in following semesters together, and generally only purchased a single textbook as well.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27 2024, @11:55PM (1 child)
> ... we scheduled most difficult classes in following semesters together,
Come on, don't leave us hanging, how did this fairy tale end?
+ married, lived happily ever after.
+ she fell for a bad boy and left you in the lurch
???
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2024, @01:25AM
Rich family, ethnic Chinese raised in a Muslim country - no long term future (aka her family approval) for a middle class, white boy from the US. Went back to her side of the world after grad school and that was pretty much that. For what it's worth, she didn't end up staying with her rich family, ethnic Chinese, family approved boyfriend, either.
Would have been nice if I could have picked the "best parts" of my middle class Italian background raised in New York girlfriend from high school to mix with the other, but that's not how life works...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 28 2024, @01:29AM
Kinda ditto here. No matter how well I understand, or thought I understood, any given subject, I learn a heckuva lot more when I have to train someone. I found that to be true soon after joining the military, and proved time and time again in my role as a Scoutmaster, on construction sites, you name it. Being the teacher forces my mind down paths and channels that I didn't bother to explore when I was learning for myself. Teaching children to fish, hunt, camp, etc forces me to re-examine everything again, from a safety perspective. CPR and general first aid? Yep, take a BIG step back, and reconsider everything I thought I knew.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday January 27 2024, @07:49PM (4 children)
I'll be honest. I was getting into the spirit of bashing those who have never learned to write. I was smiling like the Cheshire cat. Then, they got to the 'single finger' typing. FFS, only idiots and morons do 'hunt and peck' typing. The "study" is biased from it's very conception. Maybe the younger generation is dumber, but at least find some of them who know how to type before making such idiot claims.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 27 2024, @09:55PM
>The "study" is biased from it's very conception.
Most are. Some are better at hiding it than others.
Many also get their bias by being suppressed from publication when they don't fit the benefactors' outcome expectations.
Others get their bias from broad publication with often misleading headlines, or spiteful neglect in the popular press.
First it's Santa Claus, then it's the concept that the big world works toward "fairness for all." "Balanced presentation of all viewpoints" in journalism. Newsflash: "Scientific research" isn't even close to as pure as it was presented to you in your youth. Then we might start talking about God and the houses of worship, if you really want to offend a lot of people. They're mostly outraged because the truth hurts, though many live in denial their whole lives.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2024, @02:17AM (1 child)
"only idiots and morons do 'hunt and peck' typing."
My hands are crippled by Dupuytren's contracture you insensitive clod.
I have noted that insensitive clod seem to be your basic operating system.
(Score: 2) by cereal_burpist on Sunday January 28 2024, @09:35PM
Stephen Hawking did more with less ;-)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2024, @02:57AM
To bash the study another way:
>High-density EEGs, which measure electrical activity in the brain using 256 small sensors sewn in a net and placed over the head
Were the subjects shaved? How much motion artifact crept into the recordings? Even if the electrode nets were stable and in good contact, a lot of what is picked up in EEG is attributable to facial muscle and other electrical activity outside the skull, you know: where the electrodes are... Too lazy to open the article, somebody can enlighten me if they are so inclined, did these Psychologists on the Frontier enlist reputable experienced neurologists to interpret the readings, or did they just borrow their equipment and "wing it?"
Ever see somebody who sticks their tongue out and bites it while writing? Other facial tics associated with concentration and effort are even more common. Even EEG readings that are coming from the "deep brain" are heavily influenced by motor activity, especially fine motor control. How were these confounds controlled to establish an "increase in connectivity" as opposed to the simpler explanation of an "increase in activity?"
A lot of EEG based "mind controlled" toys are actually being controlled by the subject's forehead muscle activation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday January 27 2024, @09:37PM (3 children)
Traditional legend is, John von Neumann used a fountain ink pen to write instruction code for ENIAC/EDVAC on paper forms, which typist girls used to punch on paper tape.
Coding forms was a common method of writing programs even decades later, used with punch cards for Assembly, Fortran or Cobol on mainframes.
Myth is, JvN never made a mistake or typo in his code. I believe that myth. The instruction sets were his design, he had those machines in his head completely.
Though I am not that level of a genius, since the young age I use a pencil to write first version of any code on paper. Square paper my favorite. I even wrote my first programs about a year before I had any touch to any computer. Also, writing lot of code on paper was a necessity for programmable calculators like TI58/59, for their magnetic strips were a scarce (and costly) resource.
I am telling you: writing code by hand first significantly improves its quality. Always. Because it enforces focusing and thinking. Brain stuff. Editable writing makes people think too lazily and make oversights fast.
He who is fastest strays farthest. The decadence of post-modern software is closely bound to usage of editors and IDEs. That, and cheap CPU time.
Naive coders fall to illusion if it compiles, it's done, disrespecting the factual code correctness. Copy/paste is the most evil feature of programming editors.
For decades, I compensate keyboarding (and mousing) with oil painting (funny young me) and calligraphy (me old serious). Using a fountain ink brush. Just like with sword, it's all about projection of intent.
So, rarely satisfied, I endorse the research from this article.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 27 2024, @10:06PM (2 children)
>writing code by hand first significantly improves its quality. Always
I don't go that far, but writing out a description of what the code intends to do - say: in a wiki page - tends to help me a lot. Lately I have also taken to sketching use case stories, xkcd style, to include in the wiki pages. I find that the sketches help communicate with the rest of the team - from marketing to testing to other coders - much more efficiently. Taking 3 hours sketching up a bunch of cartoon panels may seem unproductive, right up until it saves you from days of rework because somebody in the team didn't understand what the code was doing until they started using it. Often, marketing won't realize that they have miscommunicated with development until the product has made it all the way through testing to release - not only are they unhappy, but it is a massive waste of resources to go back and revise at that point. Test will develop useless protocols because they misunderstand the wall-of-text requirements they are testing to. Developers will write bad requirements because they "don't get the picture," etc.
We had an EE side problem not too long ago, and sketching out a proposed circuit diagram pencil on paper, photographing it with my cellphone and blasting it to the team was a super-efficient way to communicate the whole proposition in a way that most team members, even the EEs, didn't really grasp from spoken words in meetings. It's also fun to come back, a year after the initial e-mail blast, and see the similarity between the proposed solution and the final one selected, particularly after all 37 cooks attempt to make their contributions to the soup in the meantime.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2024, @11:00PM (1 child)
A few years ago I applied for an e-tech job (beneath me but needed a stepping-stone). One of the (too) many online tests pre-interview involved some analyzing, changing, and drawing from scratch some simple analog circuits. IIRC I drew it by hand, scanned that, and sent it in. But I'm an old fart, learned to do diagrams by hand. I can do CAD but slower, and too many of my creative neurons are mostly pulled into the figuring out the CAD software. In a few cases I ended up using some very old (90s) e-CAD stuff that was so simple it couldn't steal away any thinking.
Some 30 years ago I worked for an industrial controls contract engineering company. All top Fortune 50 companies. Anyway, gobs of time and effort were spent, and all well defined and documented, on customer needs analysis. I mean they really hashed it to death. At the time I thought it was onerous, wasteful, and super glad I didn't have to do that part of the projects. Well, looking back, I learned a lot from all of that, and I'd like to think it's made me a much better engineer (sometimes...)
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2024, @01:58AM
> gobs of time and effort were spent, and all well defined and documented, on customer needs analysis. I mean they really hashed it to death. At the time I thought it was onerous, wasteful, and super glad I didn't have to do that part of the projects. Well, looking back, I learned a lot from all of that, and I'd like to think it's made me a much better engineer (sometimes...)
My first "real job" ran for 12 years after grad school, basically realizing the ideas of one man with a small team of engineers, never more than 10 people involved in development and "the guy" in the thick of it throughout. We didn't have to document much, and we made incredible progress at times. For a couple of years we shot out in front of the industry for computed polygraph analysis - listening to the sales guys of established companies try to put us down was kinda funny, they'd insult the size of our monitor, or the lack of sound effects when "turning the page" - while their software only did record and playback EXACTLY as pen on paper did it, down to the scratching noises of the pens as the signals changed, but they completely lacked deeper analysis and computation on the data they were collecting, had no ability to compress the display slower than a typical paper rolling speed, nor expand it faster than typical paper speeds, even their vertical gain adjustments were highly limited, as if you were changing settings on a pen on paper polygraph. We were computing breath rates, volumes, R-R intervals, R-R interval variability before it was a "cool" thing to do, and hundreds of other things from the literature that had been published from people hand computing these things extremely laboriously. Additional plots beyond time series, etc. probably three years ahead of everyone else. Then, slowly but surely the industry started following with teams of 30+ software engineers duplicating what we had done with a team of 3, counting the designer and tester. They started rolling out "nice to have" features like drop-down file selection and folder browsing that just ate up too much time for us to replicate with one programmer - quicker for us to wait for Windows 95 to come out and get those features "for free" in the API. A lot of things in those days it was "quicker to wait" for computer industry progress to solve the problem for you instead of you trying to solve it for them.
These days, it's much more widely accepted that "anything is possible" and instead of proving that you can do something in a computer, it's better to figure out what you want to do first and then make it right. The product I'm working on has been on the market for 30+ years, and as such has a large established user base who basically don't want innovation or changes, but we keep doing them anyway to "stay ahead of the competition." It's a nasty balancing act. One of those "innovations" about 15-20 years ago was to print reports, on paper. So then we started putting .pdf files on USB sticks - which are now highly toxic in IT security circles and outright banned in many of our customers' sites. So now, to "solve" that security problem, we're putting the devices on the network so they can get software updates and export reports through the ethernet and/or WiFi ports - yeah, no security problems there...
Even when the documentation party runs for months and then ends up with the decision to call the whole thing off, that's a better waste of time than spinning up an entire development team for a couple of years and trying to sell something that nobody wants. That first company I worked for literally made better mousetraps - top of the field best products in the world for their niches. The world did not beat a path to our door to buy very many of them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Saturday January 27 2024, @10:47PM (4 children)
I bet they could do a study and find that those writing cursive are brighter than those printing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday January 27 2024, @11:00PM (2 children)
Sometimes superior fine motor skills is correlated with a deficit in spatial reasoning. Sometimes this correlation is found more in one sex than the other. But "woke" society demands denial of such realities, to preserve some notions of equal opportunity through the delusion that all people are equally capable of anything.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Sunday January 28 2024, @02:07AM (1 child)
Funny you mention that, I was given model airplane kits as a kid to build (using entirely too much Testor's plastic cement in the process). I'm not sure if it helped or hurt spatial reasoning, but manipulating small parts in three dimensions while training on how they actually connected in a model of a complex mechanical system is something that I feel like I built on from a very early age, especially since my dad pooh-poohed the age range recommendations as twice as old as necessary.
I feel like it helped me visualize things a lot in future studies. But maybe it was just from being so close to that glue for so many hours at a time. Who can say, really.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2024, @02:38AM
>manipulating small parts in three dimensions while training on how they actually connected in a model of a complex mechanical system is something
that Legos are excellent for...
>maybe it was just from being so close to that glue for so many hours at a time. Who can say, really.
I sometimes credit a little LSD experimentation in my late teens for some of my ability to see things from various - sometimes uncommon - perspectives, and those additional perspectives that I lacked before helped me tremendously to - paraphrasing a David Lee Roth radio interview of the day "stop sweating the little shit, and realize it's all little shit." On the other hand, I just watched "Squaring the Circle" the Hipgnosis album cover studio's documentary on Netflix, and they threw in the Syd Barrett cautionary tale of what too much experimentation can sometimes result in, and that certainly is true.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday January 27 2024, @11:08PM
I only skimmed the article, but I was also wondering if those of us who touch-type would have a different study result, rather than "hunt-and-peck"ers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DrkShadow on Sunday January 28 2024, @01:20AM (2 children)
This was the point of teaching cursive writing - not because anyone liked it, not because most of anyone would use it, not because people were good at it or because it was graceful - but because it helped grow fine motor control of your hands.
Presumably most of us, as we age, get a bit shaky in the hands. We can't play games as well, or manipulate the control sticks as exactly as when we were teenagers. We could, if we'd keep practicing. We could get it back, if we practice - with something like cursive writing. My strokes now are sharp jolts. Nothing round or fancy. I lost it.
Fine motor skill development, increased brain connectivity? Sure... keyboards, bash a button and call it good? I don't need much fine motor control for that. It's kind of just reach and bash. I backspace a lot, too. Not carefully - the backspace button is pretty big.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday January 28 2024, @01:59AM
What flavor of revisionist history do you come from?
Of course it wasn't to "grow fine motor skills": cursive allowed people to write faster when writing was the only way to record anything on paper. It was an essential skill to communicate with your fellow human beings efficiently. Children learned cursive to have a tool to study efficiently later, and have a chance at being efficient in their working life later. And to write long letters to their loved ones too without struggling.
And before the rollerball pen, people also learned to write with fountain pens, which is a totally different way of writing. I learned it as a kid because our school taught us. My generation didn't need it anymore but it was still taught. My parents however had to learn it and spend hours doing lines to get good at it because there was nothing else to write in ink with.
(Score: 1) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2024, @02:28AM
>We could, if we'd keep practicing.
Yes, and no.
Many things in life are "use it or lose it" particularly as we age past child bearing years. However, some lose it faster than others, with or without continued practice. Some never did "get it" in their youth no matter how diligently they practiced. Yes, there is lack of skill development through laziness, but there is also a great deal of lack of develop-ability of various skills in various people because people vary genetically and developmentally. Some realities of development make some things difficult, possibly impossible, for people who have "developed away" from certain things. Traumatic Brain Injury certainly is a developmental reality that limits some people from some skills, but there are many other more subtle realities of brain development that also affect us all.
I practiced piano until I hit my plateau. I have a good ear, I might have been trainable to perfect pitch - it didn't come 100% naturally for me like some people I have known, but I'm probably 90% of the way there with little effort. There are definitely people who are untrainable to anything even resembling perfect pitch. For me, my piano playing plateau came with simultaneous two hand playing. I can play left handed, I can play right handed, I can hit the notes and I know when I miss, I can learn the chords and get them as well, in good time and with good expressiveness soft and loud. What I cannot do, no matter who shows me how, tells me "tricks", or tries to train me is: play with any fluidity whatsoever two hands at the same time. Whereas "normal" piano students progress to two handed playing in the 2nd book and it's a small step forward for many of them, I hit a wall and it becomes 100x harder for me, and no amount of practice seems to improve that. I have played one handed together with other people playing the other hand much more successfully than I have ever played with two hands myself. As you imply: "use it or lose it," without practice my piano skills return to a sort of baseline far below what I can do with practice.
So, if you remember Tonto from the now un-PC Lone Ranger joke: "What you mean 'we' kemo sabe?" Not everyone can develop cursive writing skills in the first place, much less keep them later in life through continued "practice."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday January 28 2024, @01:49AM
and I call bullshit on typing being faster. It is faster than writing everything in full for sure - and writing everything in full may indeed force the writer to pay attention to spelling, since they have to get it right all by themselves without a spellchecker. But nothing beats shorthand for speed, apart perhaps stenotyping.
However, I will say this: I haven't written anything longer than a single page letter since I left college, and I haven't written anything longer than 3 words on a Post-It note for at least 20 years, and I'm SO glad for that. Writing SUCKS! I can type way faster than I write (and without a spellchecker too) and it's such a blessing to be able to write long things without getting a nasty cramp in my hand after an hour.
Thank goodness for computer keyboards!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday January 28 2024, @01:55AM (1 child)
I've been considering something similar to this for a long time. Think of the differences in how we express ourselves, all of which engage the language center in addition to:
I've always suspected we're slowly losing a component of our cognition as we replace digital (def. 6) [merriam-webster.com] manipulation with, well, digital manipulation. We amphibian-come-lately types and beyond have coevolved with extensive use of our claws and paws, even as we started sitting at a desk within the last 400 years, using a typewriter within the last 150 years, and using the touchscreen within the last 30.
While our brains grew and evolved alongside how we grasped and moved things in three-dimensional space (even on just a desk), it just seems to me that discarding some of that will accompany some yet-undetermined atrophy in the rest of our cognitive processing, within what is basically a heterogeneous electrified flan.
In summary: touch and move actual things. Sounds ridiculously simple, but its absence seems like it could have unexpected consequences, especially in younger minds.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 28 2024, @05:06AM
>In summary: touch and move actual things.
Or, get very skilled in the tools of the day...
Flowing script handwriting was a skill practiced by a minority of h. sapiens until a very brief time window running ~50 to 20 years ago. The world literacy rate didn't exceed 45% until the 1960s, in 1900 it was at 21%. And, by 2000, global internet connectivity took off, mobile phone networks were reaching a majority of the world population, and the kids "started going digital."
Before 1900, world literacy rates were below 20%, and if you roll back to the 1500s you've got the "golden age of gilded bibles" produced by an extreme minority of the general population.
>While our brains grew and evolved alongside how we grasped and moved things in three-dimensional space
If you want to get into evolutionary discussion, there is - as far as I know - zero evidence for handwriting pre h.sapiens. Maybe cave painting? I'm sure some pre h.sapiens societies had individuals who practiced some fine motor skills, and by the time we were weaving cloth and sewing that was certainly a finer motor skill than planting and harvesting grain, or digging traps and thrusting spears at mastadon. Maybe making the spear in the first place counts as some finer motor skill - as would harvest and curing of the hide to make leather straps and similar things.
>its absence seems like it could have unexpected consequences, especially in younger minds.
Billions of years of evolution got us to h.sapiens without handwriting levels of fine motor skills development. The kids are adapting to, and improving, digital interfaces just as their parents and grandparents adapted to handwriting while previous generations, as my grandfather put it: followed a mule's butt around all day. He gave all that wonderful farm life up to go maintain planes for the Army in WWII and later worked in vehicle maintenance, twisting wrenches and similar things which are very un-monkey-like even if we do use the term "wrench monkey" all too often. I might get the label "code monkey" some days, but my touchscreen, keyboard, and mouse skills are nothing that have had generations to evolve in.
We are deep into generations of unexpected consequences from all sorts of things. The advent of industrial level global seafaring really starts my era of concern for "unintended consequences for future generations." Dropping cursive from the school curriculum is pretty far down on the list of things I would worry about. Undeveloped brains with unlimited screen-time access to global media like Tik-Tok? Yeah, that's up there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mendax on Sunday January 28 2024, @05:26PM
I do a lot of journaling and it's always in longhand. It's a very therapeutic thing for me to do and it's very pleasant, especially when you consider that I use a fountain pen. It's the best way to lay ink down onto paper. I pity the kids growing up today because they will likely never know the pleasure of writing by hand. Around the time of the beginning of the pandemic I gave a book to the son of a very good friend of mine who came for a brief visit, a fellow with whom I have maintained a long snail mail correspondence. The next letter I received from him contained a short, hand written letter by the boy, who was eleven at the time, in messy block letters, not cursive, because he was never taught how to do that kind of writing. This kid is doomed if he suddenly discovers that the battery in his laptop has failed, the hard drive or SSD has FUBARed itself, or he loses his smartphone.
Longhand writing has another value to me: I make fewer mistakes when I do it. Most of the time when I had to write a paper, whether it was in high school, college, or grad school, I wrote it in longhand first. Typing it up afterward let me kill the few remaining mistakes I made. When I compose something by typing it up I find to my chagrin that I sometimes create some of the word salad that Donald Trump is now letting loose at his public appearances. Bad grammar, missing words, wrong words. It's just awful and I have to work long and hard at proofreading it and even then I don't catch them all. There are probably some in this post.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.