We often take for granted that most writers in the modern era perform their work on computers. Like most bloggers, I’m composing the first draft of these very words on a computer. Indeed, for the vast majority of writers, amateur and professional alike, the physical act of writing is synonymous with the physical act of typing. Since the advent of the typewriter, the rapid plunking of fingers on keys has long been viewed as the most expedient method for getting words on a sheet of paper.

Still, there are a small number of writers out there who shun keyboards of any kind, preferring the simpler, time-honored, analog implements of paper and pen. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), for instance, famously disliked working indoors, preferring to write most of her poetry during long walks through the fields and woods. Neil Gaiman has been known to use a fountain pen when working on early drafts of new stories. And farmer, poet, activist, novelist and essayist Wendell Berry, similarly eschews computers and typewriters in favor of paper and pencil.

In his essay, Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer, Berry cites both environmental and ethical reasons for why he chooses to work with analog tools instead of a computer, enumerating his personal standards for adopting new tools in his work. These include: “The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.” “It should use less energy than the one it replaces.” And, “It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.” He adds:

… when somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.

Certainly, no computer is going to help anyone write better than Dante. That said, Berry wrote his essay in 1989, long before the advent of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, when speed and ease of editing were only primary advantages computers provided writers over analog tools. It is interesting to revisit these criteria at a moment when computers can now even write for you but at even great monetary and environmental cost.

While Berry’s reasons for resisting digital technology are worth pondering, his reasons for embracing handwriting in his follow-up essay, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” (also published in Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer), strike at the real heart of his issues with computers, and offer a deep reflection on the value of writing as an embodied act. Beginning with the argument that much technological development aims to squarely “solve” the challenges of human embodiment, Berry writes:

The danger most immediately to be feared in “technological progress” is the degradation and obsolescence of the body. Implicit in the technological revolution from the beginning has been a new version of an old dualism, one always destructive, and now more destructive than ever.

The dualism Berry refers to, of course, is the legacy Cartesian dualism of res cogitans vs. res extensa—that is, the dualism of mind vs. body. For Berry, the computer is something of an imperialist instrument for a modern paradigm that views the body as an encumbrance of the mind, something to be freed of rather than embraced. Typing, argues Berry, reduces “the intimacy of the body’s involvement in the making of a work of art.” Citing the value of this intimacy, Berry writes:

The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes.

These hesitations, flaws and mistakes are only visible on the handwritten page. For Berry, the character of one’s writing, especially in early drafts, includes the character of the physical artifact, which, when produced with an industrial machine like a computer, is otherwise homogenized and destroyed. Claiming that the roughness and aesthetics of a handwritten manuscript has value beyond mere character, however, Berry elucidates its value in the editing process as well:

The computer apologists, it seems to me, have greatly underrated the value of the handwritten manuscript as an artifact … my handwritten pages have a homemade, handmade look to them that both pleases me in itself and suggests the possibility of ready correction. It looks hospitable to improvement.

And to those who quibble with Berry’s argument that handwriting hardly qualifies as a fully embodied act, or that the modicum of physical activity found in the act of writing by hand makes one iota of difference in the quality of one’s writing, he retorts:

Reading aloud what we have written—as we must do, if we are writing carefully—our language passes in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind. They cannot make sense in the mind until they have made sense in the body. Does shaping one’s words with one’s own hand impart character and quality to them, as does speaking them with one’s own tongue to the satisfaction of one’s own ear? There is no way to prove that it does. On the other hand, there is no way to prove that it does not, and I believe that it does.

But it’s Berry’s final argument against computer-based writing that I find most insightful and fascinating: the value of the subtle but visible history of editing and evolution that naturally results when writing text by hand.

A handwritten or typewritten page … is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains parts and relics of its own history—erasures, passages crossed out, interlineations—suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to. The light-text on the computer screen, by contrast, is an artifact typical of what can only be called the industrial present, a present absolute. A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization.

In Where the Action Is, computer scientist Paul Dourish makes a similar observation about the value of palimpsests, citing human-computer interaction studies evaluating the transition from handwritten to electronic medical records in hospitals and doctors’ offices. He writes:

From a technical perspective, patient record cards are simply carriers of well-defined information concerning the patient’s diagnosis and treatment, and, as embodied on paper, present various problems: they can be lost, they can be hard to read, and they can only be in one place at one time. From this perspective, it seems both straightforward and beneficial to replace paper records with electronic versions. However, in practice, such straightforward replacements are rarely successful … paper records are more than simply carriers of information about patients … For example, handwriting on the forms reveals who performed different parts of the treatment; wear and tear on the form indicates heavy use; and the use of pencil parks rather than pen informally indicates tentative information.

In our rush to digitize the world, we often underestimate the value of the patina, subtle imperfections, and otherwise visible history of the physical objects we choose to digitize. And in the process of digitization, we both erase that history and then fail to recreate it. This is exacerbated by the fact that visualizing or simulating the ambient cues of a digital object’s history remains mostly ignored as an area of research in user experience design. Certainly, we could do better.

The physical design of computing devices largely ignores the full, embodied experience of being human. The input and output mechanisms on most devices are usually comprised of nothing more than screens, speakers, keyboards and touchscreens. Using computers and smartphones, we are contracted down, simplified to a set of fingertips and a pair of eyes and ears for the sake of the machine. Berry’s observations offer a welcome reminder that we need not always minimize ourselves to accommodate our devices; sometimes the simpler, earlier tools are better and more expressive in ways we don’t often appreciate.