Of FPs Retaining Their Use As Professional Tools For Writers.

[Bristol24]

In reading and rereading and then reading yet again the post that started this thread I have yet to determine what my reaction should be.  Do I marvel in awe?  Laugh my head off?  Burn my Funk & Wagnalls (as it is obviously of no use)?  Or, do I go along with what might very well be a truly artful leg-pulling?  I suppose I could just address the question as finally posed after what can only be described as a very circumlocuitous means of getting there.  My answer: As much as I love writing with a fountain pen, I have yet to find one with a delete button...

 

Cliff

[Karmachanic]

2 hours ago, Bristol24 said:

As much as I love writing with a fountain pen, I have yet to find one with a delete button...

 

I find that living at a slower pace, and forethought, generally negates the need for deletion.  Don't rush the brush, as we used to say in my homeland.

 

I make mistakes when the nib is here and my mind is there.

[ENewton]

33 minutes ago, Karmachanic said:

 

 Don't rush the brush, as we used to say in my homeland.

 

 

In your homeland, is this expression used in relation to calligraphy, or to writing in general, or to a wider range of activities?

 

In any case, it is timely for me.  Yesterday I practiced the same three small calligraphy samples--each a set of two characters, connected--for several hours, hoping to produce an attractive sample of each combination before putting down the brush.  It was late before I understood that my very persistence was thwarting my intent.  From now on, I think I will practice until fatigue sets in in my arm or my mind, and consider any success as a welcome surprise. 

 

Thank you.

[Karmachanic]

31 minutes ago, ENewton said:

a wider range of activities

 

I'm working on developing an open spacious mind in every activity.

[david-p]

I confess that, while I have a continuous history of writing with a pen, I have become used to doing any extensive writing in Emacs or Notepad. I intend to revert to using pen for the first draft, but it hasnt happened yet.

 

I rationalise this:

 

My intention is not to use my printer any more than is essential. The reasons are to save trees and time. So I use Emacs for the first draft because I can write all my thoughts in any order and easily move them about the document until it becomes coherent. Emacs and Courier font also have the advantage of not making my prose look too finished  at this stage. I use pen for correcting the printout of this, at the point when I can get no further.

 

Only at the final step do I fancy-format my text, using either Word for something I have to send to my publisher, or Atom for internet documents using html.

 

Where I have always used a pen is for „to do“ or shopping lists. I write these on a twice-folded sheet of A4, which makes A6, a size that is ideal for these purposes — it contains the maximum of things I can do in a day or carry home from the shops!

 

Note: In a further proof of my parsimony, the A4 sheet that I fold is a single-sided print out of a draft that I no longer need. Folded it can be used four times!

 

David

Edited July 25, 2021 by david-p

[sidthecat]

I journal and take notes in fountain pen, and I make drafts by hand before switching to the computer. It works well for me.

[ParramattaPaul]

5 hours ago, Karmachanic said:

 

I find that living at a slower pace, and forethought, generally negates the need for deletion.  Don't rush the brush, as we used to say in my homeland.

 

I make mistakes when the nib is here and my mind is there.

I think if I lived at a slower pace I'd be in 'park'. 

 

I have to go with Bristol on this one.  I need not only a delete key but a backspace key as well.  The many, many times that I've tried writing in longhand have taught me that the composition or wording that seemed so good in my head, as I thought of what I wanted to say was not  that good as I read it or even wrote the very next sentence.  Even these few sentences have been read and edited in the two minutes or less it has taken me to write them.  That is my unfortunate circumstance, and I applaud those who are more capable.

[brokenclay]

5 hours ago, ParramattaPaul said:

I think if I lived at a slower pace I'd be in 'park'. 

 

That's the dream!

[Bo Bo Olson]

One is more long winded on a computer than on a typewriter. One is lazy and thinks how to slim and shorten a sentence before typing it on a typewriter, instead of regurgitating with a computer.

 

I'll never give up my smart typewriter, with spell check......my favorite book before computer spell check was a famous little spell check book, that I finally got rid of in the last culling of my library.

 

Way back in the when of little green screens, I almost got a Brother smart typewriter, where one could hit a button and erase the misspelled word or part of a sentence. Instead I got a one piece transportable Kaypro with 64K memory.** Best one could buy then was 128K....for lots more.

 

**Call it a 40 pound laptop. It wasn't scattered around a desk like a Commodore or Atari. Had a great keyboard of a $10,000 machine.

 

This was the time when you could put every program written on the huge 10 Meg Winchester disk.

[inkstainedruth]

On 7/24/2021 at 11:05 PM, sandy101 said:

I'm sure if you post pictures of the three unknown pens, someone will be able to identify them. 

Sadly that would involve both figuring out how to do uploads on the new system, and knowing where my husband stashed the pens in the first place.....

I suspect that HE doesn't even remember where he put them.....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[TgeekB]

I journal, more to just bring thoughts out of my mind than for any serious writing. Therefore, I don’t care if I make mistakes, scribble, cross out, etc. because I am imperfect anyway. Nothing will be published, they are thrown out after fulfilling their purpose. It also brings enjoyment with my FP in hand which no typewriter or computer can produce. It’s all in the act. 

[OMASsimo]

I think it‘s funny how a thread develops it‘s own dynamics irrespective of the initial lyric. My impression was that the question was more about fountain pen use for professional work.

 

Anyway, I use my pens exclusively and every day at least for all things regarding ideas or taking notes. I do have to work out a lot of math equations and may have to discuss them with my co-workers and students. I also draw a lot of sketches to explain ideas (even to myself). Before the pandemic, I used fountain pens and paper almost exclusively and sometimes white boards when discussing in larger groups. After forced to home office, we bought tablets and pencils for my group to be able to mimic the face-to-face discussions by video conferences. This works surprisingly well.

 

I wrote all my lecture notes by hand with fountain pens first (mostly under extreme time pressure). There was little need of editing because the concept and structure was worked out before in my mind. Later I typeset them in Latex, introduced and removed again all kinds of typos, extended and modified as needed. (Funny to see the same quarrel about vi vs. emacs here I‘m so used to in my professional surroundings. Could offer a debate about svn vs. git😂). But when writing paper manuscripts, I skip handwritten drafts entirely by now. I much appreciate the possibility to first design the structure of the paper like a skeleton and then fill in the flesh/content step by step and not necessarily in the order of the actual paper. This is way more efficient than anything I could do on paper and I can work together with my co-workers all over the world simultaneously. I appreciate the possibilities we have in the 21st century - including writing with fountain pens.

[sirgilbert357]

On 7/27/2021 at 7:13 PM, inkstainedruth said:

Sadly that would involve both figuring out how to do uploads on the new system, and knowing where my husband stashed the pens in the first place.....

I suspect that HE doesn't even remember where he put them.....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

If the file is on your computer, you just drag it to the same box you type your reply in. It will upload automatically.

 

You can also just click "choose files" -- it's a hotlink at the bottom of the box you type your reply in. Easy peasy.

[sirgilbert357]

19 hours ago, TgeekB said:

I journal, more to just bring thoughts out of my mind than for any serious writing. Therefore, I don’t care if I make mistakes, scribble, cross out, etc. because I am imperfect anyway. Nothing will be published, they are thrown out after fulfilling their purpose. It also brings enjoyment with my FP in hand which no typewriter or computer can produce. It’s all in the act. 

 

And here I thought I was the only one that did this. I write in my notebooks and when they are full, they go straight into the trash. It's not even journaling, because sometimes I'm not describing anything of substance. Sometimes its an ink review or a pen review. Sometimes it's mentally talking out how I'm going to build something (the treehouse I finished awhile back took a few pages up). I guess this kind of stuff is "stream of consciousness" kind of writing. Really, its just my excuse to use my pens, for I have nothing else to write. I use them at work a bit too. But I'm sure not writing stories or anything that will ever get published.

[inkstainedruth]

3 hours ago, sirgilbert357 said:

 

If the file is on your computer, you just drag it to the same box you type your reply in. It will upload automatically.

 

You can also just click "choose files" -- it's a hotlink at the bottom of the box you type your reply in. Easy peasy.

Thanks!  I got out of the "drag and drop" process with the old software because "Upload" was so easy to use, and didn't have the number of images limit that the "drag and drop" did.

Of course that doesn't help in the case of the three pens my husband bought because I have no CLUE as to where he stashed them.  And at this point, he might not either....  And he whacked his head getting out of the mini-van the other day and now has a concussion....  Mild, fortunately -- but making him think about where he put the pens doesn't seem like a good idea at the moment....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Antenociticus]

On 7/24/2021 at 7:31 PM, sandy101 said:

Writing to me is - you start by making a big mess, and then with every draft you tidy it up until eventually you get the final version in a saleable format (usually digital). 

 

A sculptor starts with a block of wood and carves out the bits that don't look like a horse. 

 

A writer has to make the block first, and then carve out the bits that don't look like the story.  

 

I think of it as planting a dense patch of foliage, then laboriously slashing a straight line through it with a machete.

[loganrah]

I just this morning had a paper accepted to a top 5 journal in my field. The first several drafts of this paper were hand written with fountain pens (mostly a MB149).

 

Like some above I use a lot of equations and matrices in my work and I can't type those up in Latex nearly as fast as I can think, which makes handwriting actually more convenient for this work than a computer. 

 

I also find that writing by hand forces me to be more concise: I tend to end up with papers that are significantly too long if I write on a computer. 

 

I have also begun to use a physical note card system for note taking which is working better than any digital system I have tried because it forces me to be less lazy. 

 

And all this from someone who grew up using computers (I just barely remember when there was only one computer in the house and we kids weren't allowed to use it) and didn't even know fountain pens existed until into my honours year at university.

[bunnspecial]

Most of my writing is scientific/technical. Outlines are done in paper/with FPs, but actual composition occurs on the computer.

 

I'm a kid of the 90s. We were learning word processing and spreadsheets when I was in elementary school. Even though we DID learn cursive and were encouraged to write short stories and the like with them, once I learned to touch type it was all over since I could type so much faster than I could ever write.

 

As a side note on touch typing-I spent a lot of time in the typing practice problem constantly re-typing strings of letters and the like(not unlike what's in the Spencerian workbooks I've been doing), but was never great at it and didn't really learn from that. With that said, I kept plugging away at writing "real" stuff and realized one day "hey, I'm not looking at the keyboard anymore." I type enough that it's just improved from there. I can hit 100wpm but my accuracy dips well below 90%. At a more modest 80-90wpm, I'm consistently 97-99% accurate.

 

With that said, I use my FPs for a LOT of stuff that I just don't like doing on a computer. I am a professor, and my daily lecture notes for one thing get done on paper. I generally designate an 80 page Rhodia dotpad for each class each semester, and the notes just follow from there with my annotations, reminders, etc that get added during class.

 

I also frequently will hand-write things like keys to practice problems, especially since it's rather difficult for me to type math on the computer.

[david-p]

On 7/26/2021 at 2:21 PM, Bo Bo Olson said:

Instead I got a one piece transportable Kaypro with 64K memory.** Best one could buy then was 128K....for lots more.

 

**Call it a 40 pound laptop. It wasn't scattered around a desk like a Commodore or Atari. Had a great keyboard of a $10,000 machine.

 

This was the time when you could put every program written on the huge 10 Meg Winchester disk.

I had a Kaypro and wrote my 600 page dissertation on it in Perfect Writer. I increased the clock from 2.5 to 7 MHz and installed a 1MB RAM drive that worked like grease lightning, and with this the Kaypro was a magnificent machine that was only put in the shade by the NeXT. I agree that the keyboard was superb.

 

For me, one disadvantage of writing by hand is that I cant keep up with my thoughts. With the computer, my thoughts are slowed down by the brainpower used to concentrate on typing and spelling...

 

David

Edited August 4, 2021 by david-p

[sandy101]

Both google docs and Word have got half decent dictation routines on them now. 

 

Good enough for a first draft. 

 

I use them to type up handwritten notes to make hand outs for students.