averagely legible

Books In defense of writing longhand:

"And to my surprise, the easiest way turns out to be writing longhand. Not printing, mind you, but composing with a long, flowing, and delightfully irregular script that fills the page like a river of words. I sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and a thousand words roll out in a flash. And not only does it often take less time than typing, I think I write better longhand."

Everything in this piece at Lifehacker is quite right. Some of my most thoughtful, most literate writing has been done in shorthand. Most of the best bits of these Biennial reviews are verbatim type-ups of something I've written down whilst standing in front of the work.

Unfortunately, my handwriting is atrocious because I've been using computers for everything since I was in my mid-teens (early 90s) and lost the habit and once I have a long hand version I'd still have to type it up to be useful and go through an editing process to make most of the text legible and grammatical.

So I continue to type even though I know whatever's creeping out of my fingers is only averagely legible at best, a crime against English at worst (and in the case of this very sentence a little bit of both).  Most of us just don't have the luxury of being able to write everything twice.