In the second edition of Design Language — our editorial series exploring the cultural, social, and personal impacts of design — we examine the benefits, subtle joys, and enduring appeal of doing your writing the old-fashioned way.
The Pen Is Mightier: Innovation, Obsolescence, and the Written Word
by Henry Northington
You wouldn’t know it from reading this as a collection of uniform characters rendered by pixels on a backlit screen, but I’m actually writing these words on a legal pad with a .9mm Pentel Sharplet 2 mechanical pencil. It has a thick lead that resists my naturally heavy hand, a brown cylindrical body of pleasing diameter, and an almost-but-not-quite mustard yellow tip and eraser cover, making the whole thing just “ugly” enough that no one ever wants to steal it. It is, to me, the perfect writing implement.
I mention this because it’s worth noting that there is a gap between the writing and the written, and it often takes more to get from one to the next than some might think. By the time I finish this piece, I’ll have used my Sharplet 2, a Soviet-Hungarian designed Ico ballpoint pen, several sheets of ruled and graph paper, and eventually, the keyboard attached to my laptop. I could probably get it done with fewer tools, but it would be considerably less enjoyable.
That something so simple as preserving an idea or two could require such a wide range of tools is a testament to the value we place on those ideas themselves. It’s important stuff. To be understood has remained a persistent and universal human struggle, and the written word has long been our best tool to address it. It makes sense, then, that we would dedicate so much of our innovative imagination to outfitting such an effort. Without adequate means to communicate, to preserve and distribute new ideas, human progress would have stopped dead in its tracks a long time ago.
We began by using reeds to etch early writing onto clay tablets. Not long after that, we used a stylus to inscribe tablets of beeswax. Then came quill pens, fountain pens, the printing press, mechanical pencils, ballpoints, typewriters, and word processors. More recently, we’ve seen the advent of software that allows you to simply plagiarize written works that have been composed using the previously mentioned tools.
These tools have always served to ease the flow of a writer’s ideas from their mind to the page and beyond, apart from that last one. But even as previous forms of writing became “obsolete”, one method has stuck with us, even into this increasingly digital age: pen and paper.
Writing by hand endures because, more than anything, it is a means of connecting with oneself. You take a nascent thought, capture it at its moment of genesis and immediately translate it to physical motion — multiple systems activate at once, working in concert to transform the fleeting into the tangible, and you’re left with the written word. As ink on paper, a thought ceases to be just a thought. It becomes an idea, something much more durable. It becomes more intelligible, and perhaps most importantly, it becomes transmissible.
I’m not here to tell anyone how to write. That’s your business. If your ideas issue forth most readily when deposited directly into a word processor, then by all means get after it. But, there’s just something more intimate and exciting about capturing your ideas by putting pen (or pencil) to paper. If the idea’s bad, you can just tear out that sheet of paper, crumple it up into a little ball, and hurl it across the room into the wastebasket, which is much more satisfying than furiously tapping a Backspace key. Imagine the difference between tapping a button on your smartphone to end a call and slamming the receiver of a landline onto its base. They just aren’t the same.
So, at the outset of any writing project, I pick up my pencil and my pad, and I get to the critical work of liberating my thoughts, unencumbered by the unsolicited feedback of some machine. I get out everything I can, whether it’s worth preserving or not. What results usually looks like a madman’s scrawl, without any hint of formatting or sensible arrangement.
Ultimately, most of those words will find their way from the page to the pixel, and those that don’t will wind up in the (actual) recycling bin. But long before any of it makes its way into a word processor to be arranged and reluctantly spell-checked, each idea — however imperfect — finds its genesis on the physical page. What might seem to some like a waste of paper is, to me, the most essential step in the whole process. I highly recommend it.
If this all seems like a bit of luddite wankery, that’s because it is. Despite the negative associations attached to their name, the luddites were right. Not every technological advancement is worth its associated human cost, and at a time when the cost of those advancements is so plain to see, there’s real value in looking back at our existing alternatives.
I’m not suggesting anyone ride a penny-farthing to a job down at the cannery, but you’ll probably find that putting pen to paper feels much better than you remember it. It doesn’t even matter what you’re writing, because it’s the act itself that’s so satisfying. I’m pleased to report that around the office, the team seems to agree. The results of an informal poll have revealed a wide array of preferred writing implements, ranging from the mass market to the highly specialized.
A selection of Team Craighill’s daily-drivers.
Our co-founder and Design Director Hunter Craighill loves his Rotring 600 mechanical pencil. Co-founder and CEO Zach Fried stands firmly behind the ballpoint/stylus combo pen they only give out at NYC polling places. Multiple team members swear by the mighty Pilot G2, with Operations favoring the .7mm tip and Design opting for the finer .38mm version. Even though they all do basically the same thing, each one serves its user in a way that’s personal, physical, and uniquely rewarding.
It would be easy to pin this all down as the simple pangs of nostalgia, or as the ramblings of someone who clearly prefers the previous century to the current one, but there’s more to it than that. To avoid employing a cliché directly, I’ll paraphrase the always astute Philomena Cunk: “We stand at a fork in our crossroads.”
Down one path, we’ve got a world that values raw “productivity” over expression, where the creatively bereft scramble to steal, automate, and devalue the labor that makes us human. Down the other, we’ve got a pen, some paper, and the continued ownership of our ideas, our passions, and our work. For me, it’s a pretty easy choice.
