Nothing beats having a pen in your hand and a blank page. For me, the act of writing is actually writing – and scribbling, crossing out, editing and rewriting. Writing is seeing my ideas in my own personal font, not a computer-generated one. 

Last year, I went back to basics in my Grade 8 English program. Unless there was a special circumstance, we did not use computers. Don’t get me wrong; I do believe that there are many good reasons that our youth should use computers, but I needed to see my students brainstorm their ideas, organize them, write paragraphs, punctuate and spell. I needed to see what they could do, not what computers could do for them. My Grade 8’s were horrified. ”What? No chromeboooks?” But as kids typically do, they quickly adapted – and their writing quickly improved.

In 2023, my first year in retirement, I tried to spend more time working on my blog but my ideas often came out stale. I couldn’t figure out what was missing until I grabbed an old journal on my way out the door one day. With my colourful teacher pens, I spent part of my lunch outlining some percolating thoughts, then drafted (again and again and again) that night. My notebook was a visual disaster and it took longer than if I were at a computer, but my thoughts were good. They were real and they had meaning. I realized then that when I wanted to write, I needed to physically write.

The flow of ideas from brain to ink makes my words feel almost tangible. So now when I write, I pull out my fancy markers in an array of colours, and I add stickers for fun. I own my words. The computer, it just lets me share them.