In my early writing years, merely facing a blank page would stir a gnawing anxiety in the pit of my stomach; and before writing the first word, I would ask myself the question: “Where shall I begin?” To answer to that question, I relied on the wisdom distilled from two of my favorite quotes, but with little comfort:

1. “Begin at the beginning, . . . and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass.

2. “One thing is certain! You must begin somewhere, lest nothing gets written?” — My first mentor

With such advise, how could one go wrong? Every writing primer advises an author to begin with an outline to organize thoughts. In an ideal world, a writer would select a topic, prepare an outline, and write the paper from beginning to end from that outline. Rarely, does it work that way! As one writes, new thoughts arise: some to bolster or to supplement earlier points; others to raise new points or to change direction. The latter tends to disrupt, taking the writer to another place, often times altering the initial direction entirely, circumventing the original plan.

Even with occasional deviance from an outline, a poor first draft remains the better option to a blank page, because at least the writer has begun the writing process. The writer may adjust the original outline easily to meet the first draft, and add more flesh to the skeleton. Accordingly, I still prefer to start with an outline, however scanty, but remain open to new ideas and varied direction so as not to become enslaved by it.

Ernest Hemingway said it best: “The only kind of writing is rewriting,” So true, but that also is easier said than done. When words are dispersed across a page, they become embedded in the landscape and the writer undergoes pain to delete or to move them. Many times, starting anew may shorten the time instead of editing a poorly written first draft. To be sure, the first draft rarely is right; and frequently, ends up in the dust bin.

Writing is hard, and often stressful, particularly when a deadline approaches, the right word escapes, or grammatical structure collapses. Good writing is never accidental, but remains a deliberate process to place words one by one into a compelling sentence, one sentence at a time.

On April 5, 2016, the Personal Journal Section D of the Wall Street Journal carried a featured article entitled: “The Power of Handwriting,” which caught my attention. I grew up in an era when handwriting ruled, before the computer age, and well before the prominence of laptops, iPads, and smart phones. The article focused on student note taking research conducted by a host of prominent universities, including Princeton University, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Nebraska, Harvard University and Washington University (St Louis), all schools of distinction. My immediate reaction: even the best universities need to study something, however pedestrian it may seem; but the article confirmed that “researchers have been studying note-taking strategies for almost a century.” Now this factoid caught my attention, and raised the subject to a serious plateau.

Not surprisingly, the study determined that students who had typed their notes wrote faster, at 33 words per minute, than students who had handwritten them, at only 22 words per minute. The surprising part, however, the pencil pushers outperformed the typing students. Hmmmm, perhaps after all, some old world ways may be superior to the cyber world in which we live.

The researchers collectively found that students who took longhand notes “appear to learn better, retain information longer, and more readily grasp new ideas. . .” Apparently, the brain is more stimulated by the handwriting effort, resulting in better retention than by going through a mechanical typing process. The typed notes were “so superficial,” because of the “tendency to take verbatim notes.” And further: “The [handwriting] process of taking them down encoded the information more deeply in memory.”

I commend the article. After all these years, I am gratified to know that by handwriting my lecture notes I had done something right in my youth. Alas, if only I could have read my handwriting, I may have done even better.