Watery Ink: Why I Didn't Believe in Handwriting
As a student-athlete in high school, like many of my teammates, I was focused on efficiency when it came to academic work. I stayed ahead of assignments, optimized my study hours, and, most importantly, typed my notes to keep myself organized and for the convenience of studying via my phone. Since I was a water polo player, paper notebooks were a risky endeavor; pages got wet, the ink ran, and I could not be bothered with the hassle of paper in between games. I only picked up a pen or pencil, when necessary, for exams. Like many other students, I had heard about the psychology behind handwriting and the many scientific reasons that made it more conducive to learning. However, like many other students, the convenience and simplicity of digital text far outweighed the perceived cumbersomeness of writing utensils and mediums.
Walking into Special Collections at Memorial Library, my attitude had not yet changed. Handwriting occupied little to zero space in my mind. Honestly, what could it do better than my MacBook?
A collection of unassuming handwritten letters had me sorely mistaken. Reading someone’s Google document had never before brought on the feeling of intrusiveness quite like reading someone’s handwriting. As I read further, I found myself doubting my previous dismissive attitude: do handwritten texts provide an experience even the most sophisticated digital documents and fonts can never hope to recreate? To answer this question, we must first explore where handwriting came from and when society made a definitive shift to screens.
A Typed History of Letters
The earliest known examples of handwritten documents in the United Kingdom are the Bloomberg tablets, found in London's financial district, dating from 50 to 80 AD. They are a collection of impressively preserved wooden tablets, whose content ranges from financial and legal documents to general correspondence to account keeping. Craftsmen coated the wooden tablets in wax, then meticulously scratched letters—and stories—into them.
In the United Kingdom, letter writing underwent a serious maturing process. In the Middle Ages, churches used handwriting to keep records, and physical correspondence provided an environment for emotionally charged communication; writers could share essential events with recipients. Moving further along in history, we enter the Renaissance and Enlightenment, during which literacy became more widespread and letter writing expanded beyond being just for formal writing. While letter writing was mainly for correspondence in dire times before, with letters containing death lists, product lists, perhaps even notes on upcoming attacks or emergent news, now it was possible to have intimate, whispered conversations between two individuals. Letter writing continued to become more widely accessible with the invention of the postal system. Furthermore, letters took on a deeper public meaning during this time, as opposed to their original intimacy, and the ability to send and receive letters with intricate postage became a sign of elevated social status and education as letter-writing guidelines became stricter over time.
The World Wars in the early twentieth century ignited a wave of homebound family members desperate for some part of them to reach their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons on the frontlines. Receiving a letter and tracing your finger over the meticulous handwriting, over the tea stain, or over that one word you know they were never able to spell quite right brought a level of morale to the armies that general spirit-boosting messages could not recreate.
The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first dismantled the practice of handwritten letters. Phones led to calls, texts, and emails for formal communication and social media for the public. Handwritten letters disappeared like parchment in a fire. Unfortunately, the overwhelming opposition of convenience and speed associated with modern forms of communication quickly quashed the personal sentiment associated with letters. As such, letter writing has become a lost art, one we scarcely appreciate.
Intimate Conversations: C.S. Lewis and Florence Schweizer
A prominent example of the importance of letter writing is British writer C.S. Lewis’s personal letters to a woman named Florence Schweizer between 1948 and 1954. From the letters, we can discern that Schweizer was based in Madison, Wisconsin, while Lewis taught at Magdalen College in Oxford. Both typed and handwritten text on various mediums—parchment, wax paper, and monogrammed stock paper—show us short and lengthy conversations between the two, but only from Lewis’s perspective. He writes to Schweizer for various reasons: updating her on his current situation, which appears to be a wartime food shortage; thanking her for her gift parcels; and other bits and pieces of conversation that we can only partially observe. The letters are stored in a simple folder in the Special Collections archive of Memorial Library. They are preserved quite impressively, with all the original text still legible and the folds in the paper from their occupancy of envelopes, not from long-term storage in the archive.
The intimate feelings brought on by the letters are even more shocking and lead to deeper levels of self-reflection once we realize that, as the reader, we have no idea who Florence Schweizer is. A quick and convenient Google search turns up far too many possibilities; as a result, we are left with an intangible concept of a person. Nevertheless, we can see Lewis pour his heart out for this particular Florence Schweizer, evidenced by the sheer number of letters written. Some psychologists argue that handwritten letters create a safe space, allowing us to express our emotions more than real-time conversations, where it is difficult to predict precisely where the conversation will go, forcing the participants to skip over an essential statement of their feelings. The process of writing something down, taking the time to carefully phrase your words, to prepare your message, is lost in digital text. According to one healthcare system, “writing a letter gives you the ability to say exactly what you want to say to the best of your ability,” which is why they suggest writing letters in the modern day to deal with negative emotions.
A Final Plea and Acceptance of Convenience
C.S. Lewis’s letters to Florence Schweizer remind us of how to intimately communicate with someone. Primarily frail scraps of paper, his letters bring us into Lewis’ world; something sparks a feeling in his heart, strong enough to compel him to rip a page from a notebook and scramble to find a pen, setting himself down to carefully transcribe his thoughts before applying the proper postage and sending off a tangible piece of his soul. When was the last time you felt strongly enough to pour your heart onto a page? Nowadays, we instinctively go for the quick text, perhaps an emoji if we feel inspired. However, handwritten letters allow us to truly express our uniqueness (Right: Business Insider graphic of handwriting psychology, detailing what unique quirks in handwriting may indicate about an individual.) With physical letters, perhaps you curve your ys just so, or you forget to cross your ts. There is something so you about your writing, and I hope we do not lose this experience.
Yet it is still highly likely that you and I—along with most of the modern world and future generations—will default to digital texts, empowered by our MacBooks, Lenovos, iPhones, and Samsungs. Yet, hopefully, we will all move forward with an increased appreciation for the corporeal feel of ink and paper. Everything dies twice: once when it physically leaves this world, and once more when it leaves the minds of every other physical being.
Author’s note: Thank you to the Special Collections Archive at UW-Madison for allowing me the opportunity to explore so many amazing and rare texts. If you are interested in seeing the items discussed in this essay, visit this link to find C.S. Lewis’ letters under call number MS 208 in the Special Collections Archive. Be sure to check out the rest of their collections as well; while these specific letters were my awakening, yours might be something entirely different!
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Funding for this series—which allowed HH to pay student writers and editors—was generously provided by the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries. Special thanks are due, as well, to the staff of Special Collections, and especially to Lisa Wettleson, who guided students through the process of learning how to conduct original research in rare book and archival libraries.
About the author: Nyla Sharma is a freshman honors Biology student at UW–Madison, originally from Mountain View, California. Despite her major, she has always loved English and writing, being an active part of poetry clubs in high school and here at UW–Madison.
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