By Hand

Carrie and Megan talk with Tim Brookes about his newest book, By Hand, about the importance of handwriting.

NBER report

Current Affairs

WOTY: 

• 6-7
• rage bait
• parasocial
• vibe coding
• AI slop
• maple washing

Chapters

• 11:22 Interview with Tim

Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Megan Figueroa: I'm Megan Figueroa. 

Carrie: And I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: I just listened to the episode before we hopped on, and I loved it. 

Carrie: Oh, that's awesome.

Megan: It's always nice. Always nice to be like, yay.

Carrie: I know. Yes, and our guest is a second-time guest.

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Tim Brooks, and he's very charming.

Megan: He's lovely.

Carrie: He's always very charming. 

Megan: Yep. 

Carrie: I forgot to ask him to tell everybody where to buy his book. So, we should do that. 

Megan: Yes. Yeah. 

Carrie: I'll put it in the show notes as well. But his website is endangeredalphabets.com, and if you go to his shop, link at the top, you can go right to By Hand, and you can go right directly to the author. That's probably the easiest, best way to buy it. So, please do that. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: I thought today we could talk about Word of the Year because a bunch of them have come out. The American Dialect Society has not come out with theirs yet, but that will be soon.

Megan: In January, they had the vote in the first week of January. 

Carrie: Yes, at the LSA. Yeah. Okay, so, so far, have you heard of any of them yet? 

Megan: Six seven. I don't remember whose was six seven.

Carrie: Dictionary.com was six seven. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Anything else? 

Megan: That's the only one I've heard. 

Carrie: Okay. I was keeping track, but I didn't have all of these. So, I am using Ben Zimmer's post on Facebook because about five days ago, he had posted a picture. So, yeah, dictionary.com, six seven. Oxford Dictionary, rage bait. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Cambridge Dictionary, parasocial.

Megan: Oh.

Carrie: Collins Dictionary, vibe coding.

Megan: Okay, I've not. 

Carrie: You don't know that word at all? 

Megan: No, I know vibe. I don't know vibe coding. 

Carrie: Oh, my God. Helen Zaltzman on this post also said the same thing. Like, that she'd never heard it before. And I was like, oh, God, does that mean I'm too online? Yes. I guess the answer is yes, I'm too online. So, vibe coding is when you get an LLM to code for you. So, you're like putting in your prompts and, yeah. Yeah. 

Megan: Oh, God, the level of trust that people place in it is remarkable. 

Carrie: I don't get how you can trust Gen AI at this point. Like, I mean, I didn't trust it at all, really. But like by this point, we know that this is not. No. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: But people still claim that it codes well. And I'm like, I doubt that, but okay. 

Megan: Right. Yeah. Well, I've heard if you're a good coder, you can prompt it well to find errors or make things more efficient or something. Like, I've heard that, but I don't know.

Carrie: Maybe it's true. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Anyway, vibe coding. And then Macquarie Dictionary, AI slop. 

Megan: That's Australian, right? 

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Megan: Yeah. AI Slop. Yes. Yeah, I think that actually might be closer to mine. 

Carrie: What's yours? 

Megan: No, no. Like, I'm just thinking about that one kind of hit, like, feels right so far. I haven't really thought about it yet, but yeah, AI Slot feels. 

Carrie: Yeah, it feels appropriate, for sure.

Megan: Timely. Yeah. 

Carrie: Okay, so the last one, which didn't come out until after Ben Zimmer's post, was the very first Canadian English word of the year. 

Megan: That's exciting. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Okay, so, like, Canadian English, just things that might be very specific to Canada.

Carrie: Yes, yes. A word that is used by Canadians in Canadian English. Yeah.

Megan: Okay. What is it? 

Carrie: Maple washing. 

Megan: What? I've never heard that. I'm not Canadian. Have you heard it? 

Carrie: Of course, yes. Yes.

Megan: Okay. I can kind of pick up on what it might mean.

Carrie: Well, what do you think it means? 

Megan: Maybe it's like, I don't know, your Canadians are boycotting American goods. Maybe it's like buying instead Canadian goods. 

Carrie: Close. 

Megan: Okay.

Carrie: So, it's absolutely related to Canadians boycotting as much as feasible American goods and services. As a reaction to that, many grocery stores have slapped on maple leaves all over the place to really highlight the Canadian products to help consumers out.

Megan: Smart.

Carrie: However, sometimes they put it on things that are not Canadian. So, they are maple washed. 

Megan: That is brilliant. I love the word. I love it. I love it. I hate that the Maple Leaf is not a reliable information for consumers.

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Megan: Huh? So, you've seen it in stores? 

Carrie: I've definitely seen the Canadian product being more highlighted than they used to be. I mean, not everybody, obviously, but there's a real concerted effort to switch. So, instead of Campbell's soup, there are Canadian soups that people are highlighting. I don't really buy prepared soups anymore. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: But yeah. Or like, makeup products. At least for a while there, people were also being like, okay, Canadian and Mexican products first, everything else second. And the United States, not at all, if possible. 

Megan: Yeah. I mean, consumers, I mean, they can do a lot of good with where they spend their money. Like when Target folded to the Trump administration, their sales are completely down. They are suffering because of it. 

Carrie: They are suffering. Yeah. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Because you can't really pivot the way they want. They tried to pivot because you'd have to be appealing to a totally different demographic. 

Megan: Right.

Carrie: And like, I guess some of their demographic is still shopping there for sure. But I don't know. I just don't think they thought their strategy through.

Megan: No, not at all. 

Carrie: Who's your core demographic? 

Megan: Right.

Carrie: It's not the people who absolutely hate DEI. 

Megan: Right, right. And then Costco going the other way and digging in their heels, and they're doing great.

Carrie: Oh, and speaking of Costco, Costco gets a carve-out for most Canadians because they're fighting the Trump administration. 

Megan: They're suing.

Carrie: Loudly, yes. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: They pay their employees well. They do try to get Canadian products to the extent possible. So, it's like, okay, we'll do a carve-out for them. 

Megan: Yeah, fair.

Carrie: Which is totally fair. I wish I liked shopping there because I think they're one of the better places to shop in terms of corporate citizenship. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: But the vibes are off.  

Megan: Well, it's a nightmare. It's always so busy. Well, also for you, like you don't have a car to put bulk items in. 

Carrie: That is true. Although I'm a member of two different car shares. So, I could use it like an Evo or a Moto car.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Free advertising for a company that only matters. 

Megan: In Canada.  

Carrie: NBC only. 

Megan: Okay. 

Carrie: I believe. Anyway, boycotting does work. It does, yeah. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: So, yeah, maple washing.

Megan: Maple washing. I love it. I love it.

Carrie: Do you have any other suggestions for word of the year for the AEDS? 

Megan: I mean, I'm really, I'm just so drawn to AI slop. I think six seven as a word of the year, the Dialect Society does a good job because they have different categories. I'm thinking it'll win one of the categories.

Carrie: Yep. 

Megan: But not word of the year. Like, that's my guess. 

Carrie: Yeah, I agree that it will be in there. It will definitely be in the mix. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: And people will be like absolutely not.

Megan: Right. Right. 

Carrie: But yeah.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: But you're right. It probably could win one of the categories. 

Megan: What are you feeling? 

Carrie: Well, one of the words that actually Jesse Greaser put in Ben Zimmer's post is chopped. 

Megan: Chopped?

Carrie: Mm-hmm. 

Megan: What is that referring to? 

Carrie: So, I see you're not on TikTok very much. 

Megan: No, I am not.

Carrie: Because that's where I learned it. That is where I learned it. It means ugly. 

Megan: Oh, okay. Could have never guessed that. 

Carrie: So, I mean, obviously, this is a very online term and like, yeah, I don't know how widespread it's become, but it's certainly in the mix. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that's all the suggestions on this particular post, but I'm sure there's lots and lots and lots. 

Megan: Yeah, like the Dialect Society does, like Most Likely to Succeed. I think AI Slop, I think that might succeed. 

Carrie: I mean, it's definitely already succeeded, I would say.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: AI Slop feels like it's been around for a few years. I don't know if that's true, but it just feels like it's just, oh, yeah, that's the normal term. 

Megan: Right, right. Yeah. 

Carrie: Whereas chopped feels more like slangy to me. 

Megan: I think they have a "slang" category. Nice. I love maple washing so much. But it's not relevant here. 

Carrie: No, no.

Megan: It's not relevant here. 

Carrie: I would be mad if it was the word of the year for the American Dialect Society. 

Megan: It would not make sense. It doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. I love this time of the year. It's fun. It's a fun little thing. 

Carrie: It is fun.

Megan: Even though the world is so dark. 

Carrie: Yeah, no, it's fine. I kind of wish I could be there.

Megan: Yeah, it's always fun to be there. 

Carrie: Who knows when I'll ever be feeling safe enough to go to the United States? 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, I guess, I'll see everybody in 2026. 

Megan: Oh, my God. Let's hope it's better than this year. But also, that's wild. 

Carrie: It might be. Things are shifting. The vibes are shifting. 

Megan: The vibes are shifting. 

Carrie: I don't know. We'll see. 

Megan: Yeah. Yeah, and enjoy the episode.

Carrie: Yeah. We'd like to thank Damian Sauvagere for becoming a patron. And just as a reminder, anyone who would like to support the show, you can do so at www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. We have stickers and mugs and bonus episodes. So, join us. 

Today, we're excited to have Tim Brooks back. He is the founder of Endangered Alphabets Project and the author of more than a dozen books, including Writing Beyond Writing, Lessons from Endangered Alphabets, and An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets. 

He is recognized as the world's leading figure in script endangerment and revitalization, but he's also the author of the book By Hand, Can the Art of Writing Be Saved? And we're very excited to have you back. So, welcome. 

Megan: Welcome back.

Tim Brookes: Thank you. I'm excited to be back. We had such a great time last time, so I'm looking forward to it. 

Carrie: We sure did.

Megan: We did. Yeah, we don't just ask anyone back. 

Carrie: No. Definitely not. Yeah, I was excited to see that you had another book. And actually, I think this is rather timely because all the technology that's being shoved down our throats. 

Tim: Exactly.

Carrie: But I'll still ask you, why did you want to write this book, and why now?

Tim: Absolutely right. This whole timeliness thing it was there at the beginning, but it also gradually crept up on me as I was writing it, and actually, it's continued to creep up on me. So, the book came out just a couple of weeks ago, and it seems as if every day since then, something else has come up in terms of either people's distrust of AI or people recognizing the importance of traditional skills, crafts, arts, all of these things.

So, yeah, let me tell you how it came about. Originally, I was going to do a book called Endangered Alphabets Calligraphy. Because what I had discovered was that there are places around the world, especially where you have minority communities that have been marginalized or outright oppressed, suppressed, who are trying to regain their connection with their ancestors and with their tradition and with their identity by teaching calligraphy in their own script. 

And there are these amazing photos I've got from Kathmandu, where the traditional Nepalese script was banned so severely that anybody found using it could be imprisoned and have all of their possessions confiscated. And then that went on for a hundred years or more. And so, when this group, right before COVID began, starting this kind of pop-up calligraphy classes where they would literally throw up a tent in the bazaar, and people would come in, and they would teach them to write their name in the traditional script. 

And the photographs of these people just holding up these pieces of paper with their names in this really beautiful vertical script, it's like the look on their faces is just transformative. That was how it began. But then, as I was thinking about this, I realized, wait a second, exactly the opposite is happening in the US, where instead of writing being a means of connecting the generations, the way we are practicing writing is actually driving a wedge between the generations. 

So, you have kids who are 10, 12, 14, 20, who can't read their grandparents' writing. They can't read the kind of foundational documents that are the heart of this country. And in fact, I had an intern, a wonderful kid, lovely, lovely guy, very, very skillful in all kinds of ways. And I asked him to address some envelopes because I needed to send stuff out, and he couldn't write address in letters that were of consistent size and height and everything. 

And eventually, I had to take it over. And I thought this is really astonishing, the degree to which this is happening. So, the book then became the question, what do these other cultures know that we should be paying attention to? And then the third part was that just as I was starting working on it, I thought, I ought to write this book by hand. 

Carrie: Okay.

Tim: My initial plan was to write it by hand and then print it in manuscript. And my handwriting was so awful, and it was such a strain to try and write because I've been a professional writer for 45 years, which means I work on a laptop or on a desktop. And my own writing was in such terrible shape that it became a kind of subjective adventure. And it was so interesting that I discovered all kinds of things that I would never have discovered if I hadn't done that. But it was so stressful that I actually wound up in the hospital. 

Carrie: Oh.

Tim: Yeah, exactly. I am prepared to suffer for my art. 

Megan: The mark of a true artist. 

Carrie: True, true.

Tim: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and I was getting so stressed trying to write it so kind of perfectly that I began having these symptoms that I thought were heart attacks, but they were actually panic attacks. So, eventually the book got printed in a typeset fashion, but I wrote virtually all of it in my journal, and that turned out to be just an amazing series of discoveries. 

Carrie: I love that. I love that you wrote it.

Megan: I know. And then you, in the book, have a picture of your writing from, I believe, the 80s versus 1990s, 99, maybe. But I was like, both of these are beautiful. 

Carrie: Yeah, same. I was like, oh, this is good handwriting. Yeah.

Megan: This is good handwriting.

Tim: Wow, things are worse than I thought. 

Carrie: Well, yes. I mean, things are bad. I mean, you could tell there was a difference. Like, I could see what you're getting at. But I was also still like, yeah, but still pretty good. 

Tim: But by the end, it's interesting that by the end of this whole period of about seven months, my handwriting was completely different. And, in fact, I asked myself this question that I had never asked myself before in my life, which was, when did I actually start enjoying the act of writing, right? So, not the act of writing a book. I've done that. I enjoy that, et cetera. But the act of forming letters and forming words. 

And I realized it was June. It was that recent. And that in itself is really revealing. The fact that something that is as central to all of our lives and our upbringing and our education, the way we communicate with those who are close to us. It never occurs to us that it should be something that we enjoy. It's a skill that we're supposed to have. So, that was just one of the many revelations. 

Megan: I was thinking about my own experience with handwriting, and I used to practice my handwriting as a tween. I don't know what that was, like, social pressure to have a certain way of handwriting, especially for women. I've noticed that too. Like, sometimes you can see these gendered constructs in the way we write as well.  

Tim: That is so interesting, you should say that, because I interviewed quite a lot of people, and every single person had, at some point, decided to abandon the way they were taught to write in elementary school and to either have a particular letter that they liked forming their own way, or actually changing the whole script they were using. And in almost every case, that change happened around puberty. 

Megan: Really interesting. 

Tim: And you're absolutely right, girls, women were much more aware of this as both as an opportunity for artistic expression and as a representative of themselves to the world. 

Megan: Yeah, yeah. Mine used to be very bubbly until probably about high school, so puberty, when I was like, nope, this is not what I want to portray myself as. I don't want it to be bubbly, rounded. Yeah, I don't want you to know what gender I identify with because of my writing. Yeah.

Tim: Interesting.

Carrie: I don't think I was quite that deep in the gender side of things. I just wanted it to be more me. I remember doing it a little bit older. I was like, first year university. Instead of doing full cursive, I was like, I need something fast that's cursive-like, but not full cursive. I just didn't like the way it looked. So, it's like it was kind of this amalgam between cursive and print, which I still use to this day. 

Tim: Exactly. So, as you know from the book, I invented this term, cluster cursive, because so many people are exactly at that point. And that raises so many really interesting questions about what writing actually is. So, there are certain combinations of letters that flow together. And so, they form this little cluster that there is no word for. And then others, they just seem determined to stand there on their own, possibly because we don't like the way in which they were supposed to be joined to other letters when we were taught to write. But we haven't actually evolved a different method. 

Carrie: Yeah, in particular, the letter I hated the most in cursive is R, and there are two of them in my name. 

Megan: Yeah, I don't like the R either. Yeah. 

Tim: Yes.

Carrie: So, I had to do something different there. Yeah.

Tim: Yeah, it's fascinating you should say the R, because again, as I mentioned in the book. First of all, concentrating more on my writing and then letting it flow more, as opposed to being, you write this letter, then you write this letter kind of thing. 

I had two different ways of writing an R beforehand, and an entirely new way developed as I was going. And I'm like, this is beautiful. It is smooth, it is swift. It has this little pigtail quality to it, which is the motion of the wrist. So, more and more, I started getting interested in the relationship between writing and the mechanics of the human body. 

And that turn of the hand, which is the radius over ulnar movement of the wrist. It's something that handwriting has in common with dance. If you do that, you realize, wow, that is the hand. The turn of the wrist and the hand of a dancer. 

Carrie: Yeah, I remember that coming up in your previous book. You talked about that.

Tim: Yes.

Carrie: Yeah.

Tim: Yeah, yeah. 

Carrie: And I thought that was so beautiful. It was the Thai dancers, right? 

Tim: Yes, yes, you're exactly right. That was the letter E. The Chan letter E. And the fact that if you were to trace that letter in the air, it has one, two, three turns of the wrist in it. And consequently, you look at it, and you go, whoa, that is beautiful. And you also go, that was not defined and shaped by print. That was defined and shaped by the act of writing by hand. 

Megan: Yeah. I'm also thinking this is just a simple thing, but I was watching basketball and looking at the back of their jerseys, and it seems like some teams allow for diacritics and other teams don't. So, I'm like, come on. We're not at the point where we can print diacritics, or that's not important to people. I'm sure it's important to the players, but it just doesn't seem to be something that the teams are doing. So, that's lost. And I thought that that was just reflecting on that.

Tim: That is really interesting. Some time ago, and this doesn't turn up in By Hand, but it comes up earlier. I realized that the British hate diacritics, and I think it's because they look foreign, and they would rather have a word like, for example, lamé, gold lamé, right? It should be L-A-M-É, acute. And if you don't have an accent, it looks like lame. But for whatever reason, the British really hate using diacritics. And they would rather have a word be ambiguous than kind of make their language look foreign. Damn it, because we're superior to those foreigners after all.

Carrie: Superior to those Europeans on the continent. 

Tim: Yeah, exactly. 

Megan: Yeah. You hinted at, say, like, what is it that other cultures realize about handwriting that we were just missing here on this continent? Like, why is handwriting important? 

Tim: Gosh. Well, many, many, many reasons. Some of them really start out in the realm of the endangered Alphabet. So, right towards the end of the time I was working on my previous book, Writing Beyond Writing, I got an email from a young woman in Jakarta in Indonesia. 

And she was saying that she came across a stash of letters from her grandfather, which he had written when he was a soldier in the Indonesian War of Independence after World War II. And she was fascinated by this, and she really treasured them. But because they were written in traditional Javanese script, which was dropped after independence, she couldn't read them. 

And so, she was teaching herself the Javanese script so she could read his letters. And so, there's that, which is this business of, as I said before, connecting across the generations and really kind of understanding who you are and where you came from. 

But then there are all kinds of other advantages and benefits, some of which are almost, they're so profound, and they're so well documented that one, they're hard to believe because they're so extraordinary. And two, it's hard to believe we're ignoring them as we stampede forward into the use of digital tools. 

So, for example, there's a lot of evidence that if you take notes by hand, you understand what you are writing way better than if you use a keyboard or, worst of all, some kind of audio transcription service. And I get those, like Grammarly, for example, those ads all the time on YouTube. 

And it only occurred to me, some way into this whole project, that when I started making my living as a writer, the equipment that you needed cost less than a day's salary. No one was getting rich off a number two pencil or even a broken-down typewriter. 

Whereas now it is in somebody's interest to convince you you need these tools because they are making scads of money. If you take out a subscription, or if you buy the software or if you buy the handwriting hardware that will actually write in your handwriting for you, we're talking hundreds to thousands of dollars. 

And when that becomes a factor, all of a sudden, it's in somebody's interest to make you believe that writing is hard work, that you don't do it very well, that your handwriting is hard to read, that you are using your time inefficiently and you could be doing 10,000 times as many things if only you entrusted it all to the digital tools. 

And we kind of are so used to that that we kind of go, yeah, that's probably true. That's probably true. And the fact is, writing efficiently is not the same thing as writing well. And writing efficiently is also, it's like a lobster pot. You go in there, and you can't get out again because then you're simply expected to do more and more and more tasks. 

And those involve less and less of yourself, your ability to think about what you're doing, your ability to be original and creative. Because all of those work much better when you're slowing down and you're allowing yourself time to think and you're writing by hand.

Carrie: Absolutely. And oh, my God, I've always had this idea, like, why are we so obsessed with productivity? It's always bothered me because it's not always better. And so, being more efficient, like, I actually think I'm trying to put more friction back into my own life because I think friction is actually where creativity comes from. Where life comes from. 

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. It's been something I've been thinking about for the past few months. Like, Gen AI is just making me so furious. But even other technology, like you were talking about, like subscriptions and things. So, today someone posted on Blue Sky from nber.org. One laptop per child 10 years later, "we find no significant effects on academic performance, but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression. Computer access significantly improves students' computer skills, but not their cognitive skills." We need to be building students' cognitive skills, like pouring that into them. I don't know. That's where I'm at. 

Tim: Yes. 

Megan: Oh, yeah.

Tim: I'm realizing that I wrote this thing that I thought was like an extended essay, but it's really becoming a crusade because all of the forces of the richest people in the country are encouraging us to believe that tech is going to solve all of our problems. And it's somehow going to make us smarter. 

The fact is, tech makes us dumber. The pencil, in Writing Beyond Writing, I have this extended essay on the pencil because the pencil is actually something that does make you smarter, because you draw a line and you look at it, and then you can improve it, and then you can improve it again, and you can improve it again. 

And it constantly presents you with the opportunity for drawing a better line or thinking more about what you're doing. Whereas AI does exactly the opposite, which is to say, just plug in what you need, and we will do the thinking. And then essentially, all you become is the input need. 

Carrie: Yeah, you're just like a meat puppet. I don't understand why we'd want this. To me, we're in a horror movie. And then another thing, these both popped up today on Blue Sky. Like, I was like, oh, my God, these are so relevant. So, this was from Current Affairs. 

AI is destroying the university and learning itself. So, the person writes. There's a philosopher, Peter Hershock, who says there's a difference between tools and technologies, right? So, tools help us accomplish tasks, but technologies reshape the very environments in which we think, work, and relate. 

So, Peter Hershock says, we don't merely use technologies, we participate in them. And I had never thought about this because like to me, everything is technology, right? Like a hammer is technology. But I actually think maybe this is good. We should separate tools which we control and technology which tries at least to control us. 

Tim: Yes, and as I was sort of finishing up this book, By Hand, I realized where am I in all of this? And I had this, you know the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times, right? So, he's working in a factory. Everything is mechanized. 

And I don't know if this is actually a sequence from the film or there's one that I kind of imagined and put into the film. But I was imagining myself thinking, I need to get out of here. I've got to do things differently than this. But my Charlie Chaplin coattail is caught in the machinery. 

And so, I'm running. I'm doing a Chaplain thing where I am running at top speed, but the machine is pulling me in the opposite direction. But I will say is that I began to realize that there is a significant difference that is rarely noticed between writing and editing or composing and editing. 

So, a laptop or computer in general it's actually a great editing device. Speaking as somebody who I cut my teeth in those early days when they said cut and paste, and it literally meant you cut the piece of paper with your scissors and then you paste it together with Scotch tape, right? 

So, clearly, the ability to manipulate text is something that the computer is really good at. But I think that most people don't draw a distinction between composing and editing. And in fact, I had a fascinating conversation with a woman who is actually the provost, which is sort of like the academic vice president of a top liberal arts college. 

And she's also a poet. And so, in what little spare time she has, she writes poetry. And then she was saying to me at work, I write all the time. And then she caught herself, and she said, actually, what I do at work is I edit. So, you get some text comes in, you have to rewrite it or move it around or edit something else or put it in a different context. 

And the difference is that you can do that at speed without a great deal of cogitation. And consequently, it makes you believe that you're being more productive and you're writing quickly, et cetera. But actually, you're doing an entirely different function. And just the act of doing that has really interesting effects on you. 

So, as you know, I spent most of the time I was working on this book writing it by and in a series of cafes and restaurants, and other public places. And on one occasion, I went to the local orchard Café bakery, and I had my laptop, and I had my journal. 

I had some editing to do of various bits of research that I was going to move around and plunk into different places. And so, I was working on my laptop, and then it said, do you want to update your OS? And I thought, why not? I'll take a break. 

I'll let the OS update, and I will get to write in my journal, which by then I was just looking forward to every time. So, I say, okay, go ahead to put the OS in. I push the laptop to the side of the table, get my journal out, get my gray pen out, and I can't write because my level of rev is so high that my primary motivation in writing is just to get to the end of the line as fast as I can. 

And it took probably 20 minutes before I was able to kind of get out of one set of brainwaves and into another one. And I thought, this is fascinating. I had no idea that that's what my brain and my body were doing at that time. It was as if I was undergoing mild electrocution without realizing it. 

Carrie: That's so fascinating. 

Megan: I think I sometimes tried to recreate writing by hand when I'm typing on a computer. Like, my docs will be like, it looks like scraps of notes everywhere, where I'll have something I wrote down. And then I'll put 10 spaces, and I'll be like something else that I wrote down because I don't want them to be considered together. 

I think of them as notes that I've been writing down. And I'll print it out and start cutting and pasting. I cut and paste stuff when it came to my dissertation, when I wrote it, because I was like, this is so much easier for me to kind of conceptualize. Like, on a computer screen, I think something's lost. 

And I don't know if that's just because I grew up in the right era. Like students growing up now. I mean, what's lost? I mean, is there just new ways of doing that we have to be forced to reckon with? I just don't know. But I'm really glad that I grew up in a time where I did write everything by hand until college. 

Carrie: Oh, wow. All the way to college. 

Megan: Yeah.

Tim: Yeah, yeah. And I did, actually, through college. Yeah. So, yes, to me, this is the most important point, which is that we don't know what's going on. All we know is that there is this stampede in this one direction, and we actually don't know exactly what effect it's having and what is being lost. 

We don't know what it would take to divert it or to pause it. We don't know which pieces of it we want to sort of prioritize, with one exception. And this is where things actually get really kind of borderline magical, and that is keeping a journal. 

So, luckily, people who work on a keyboard often also keep a journal. Some of them keep a journal on their keyboard, but a lot of them do it by hand. So, I need to tell your listeners about some of this research because, again, the research itself is fascinating, and then the fact that no one's paying any attention to it is equally fascinating. 

So, the research began in the very late 70s and early 1980s when there was this one researcher who was studying trauma survivors, not with any great hopes, I don't think. He asked them to keep a journal. And he called this positive affect journaling. 

And his version of it was specifically the direction was write about what happened to you, but write to a positive outcome. And the interesting thing I've discovered is you don't need to do that. Just writing about the thing has the same effect anyway. 

So, what he discovered straight away was that the people who wrote in their journals immediately had better outcomes than those who didn't. So, they had fewer return visits to the doctor. They had their medication usage declined. 

And so, he continued to sort of experiment with this and broaden it out. And there's now thousands of studies that have been done on this. And it turns out that the value is not purely what we would call psychological or mood-driven. 

It's not just that you write in your journal and you feel better. Actually, this carries over into physical illness, such as even such things we would describe as being like hard science things like HIV/AIDS and cancer. And then things that are on the borderline, like especially autoimmune diseases. 

And when you look at this, you kind of go, why isn't every child given a journal in school and told write in this for the rest of your life? Or you can change the color of your ink, you can change the color of your journal. Just keep writing your journal for the rest of your life. 

And I think it's because I think there's a clue in something that this researcher said when somebody interviewed him. And at this point, he'd been doing it for a number of years, and the benefits were already spectacularly obvious. And the interviewer said to him, do you keep a journal? And he said, why would I need to write? There's nothing wrong with me. 

Carrie: What?

Tim: Exactly. And I thought, to me, there's two things that he did by that. One is to say that you only need to keep a journal if there's something wrong with you, which means that the journal is essentially a form of benign hypochondria. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Tim: And so, he's actually kind of undermining the results of his own research. And the second thing I think he did, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this, I think he gendered it. I think that what he did was essentially saying, I'm a guy. We don't give in to this kind of weakness. 

And for whatever reason, journal writing is still imbalanced, with women doing it more often than men. Obviously, it's not an exclusive thing by any means, but I think there's still a sense that keeping a journal is something that it involves examining your feelings. And if you're a guy, you would rather have a root canal. 

Megan: Oh, 100%.

Carrie: That's exactly where my brain went. 

Megan: Yeah, I mean, we start with diaries, right? Like, as little girls, they have so many marketed like pink and purple and whimsical little diaries for young girls. Yeah, it's at a societal level, the assumption that that's something that girls and women do.

Carrie: And also, women tend to have more chronic diseases. I think we're also more likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues. So, to me, it's automatically gendered as soon as you said it. That's where my brain went. Yeah. Like, it's a weakness to need to journal. It's good for you, but only if you need it. And it's like, ugh. 

Tim: And the fascinating thing is that if you were to say to anybody, do you think it is generally a good thing to know yourself better? Then pretty much everybody would say, yes, of course, right? The next step, which is, okay, so how do you plan doing that? Is something that is just not addressed. It's not part of our education system. 

It's not part of our socialization. In fact, if anything, the narrative of getting to know yourself better is actually by, for example, going on adventures or putting yourself in harm's way or somehow that's how you learn who you really are. And that is more expensive, let alone more dangerous than getting a journal and writing in your journal. 

Carrie: And also, if that's what you want to do, feel free. There are people of all types. Some people, that is how they're going to learn about themselves. Never take that away. But it can't be the only way. And journaling, yeah, it could be for everybody, unlike those other things. 

Megan: Yeah, and I'm just thinking about history. Like, it serves as historical evidence, right? When COVID started, I read, maybe at that time, a tweet from a historian who said this might be a great time for the common person to just pick up a journal and start writing about this. So, I started a handwritten journal, and I documented my first year in lockdown. 

Carrie: Have you read it recently? 

Megan: No. I was thinking about it. I was like, I should go back to that. But I remember I was keeping track of how many deaths there were. Like, I mean, it kind of intersects with everything with the trauma, processing that, with just keeping a record of everything. 

Tim: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah.

Tim: In fact, it's really interesting you should say that it touches everything. So, as I mentioned to you before we came on air, I'm actually going to be moving lock, stock, and barrel from the US back to the UK. And I was sitting in, of course, a café a few days ago, and I had in front of me my journal and my phone.

And I was using the journal not as just a note jotting thing, but actually as a longhand, continuous sentence journal. And on my phone, under the notes app, I was making a list of all of the things that I needed to do. My left hand and the phone there was just all of this stress. 

And as I'm thinking about it, thinking, oh, I've got to do this, I've got to do that. I haven't done this yet, and if I don't write this down, I'll forget it. So, all of that stress was building up on the left side. And then whenever I stopped taking notes, I would start writing in my journal about what this felt like and what this experience was. And it was fascinating. 

I felt exactly like a character in one of those 1950s black and white sci-fi films, where you have these two spheres, and there's this huge spark leaping from one to the other. And it was as if all of this static electricity was building up on my left side, and it was jumping across. 

And then I was grounding it. I mean, the word grounding and being grounded is really interesting right here by writing it in my journal. And so, the voltage, the current was kind of like passing through me and then going away. It was the only way I was staying sane at that point. 

Carrie: That's really interesting.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: I do similar things, and I think you're right. Like, I do get more stressed out with the phone. 

Tim: Yeah. 

Carrie: Versus writing things down. Even though my handwriting is terrible. 

Tim: You know what? I just came across this unbelievable piece of research. And again, it was from one of these people. This was actually on Instagram. There's a number of people now who are deliberately hosting research, I mean, solid research, about this whole kind of retro approach that we're talking about here. So, for example, I came across one where somebody was talking, actually about the benefits of handwriting. 

It had 36,000 likes. But this particular one really came out of the blue. Apparently, a behavioral health researcher in Italy decided to do an epidemiological study of people who never get. And so, he managed to find a decent number. And this went on for 20 years. It was a long study. Found a decent number of people who don't get ill, they don't have autoimmune stuff, they don't have kind of infectious type stuff. 

And he wanted to find what the common factor was. And of course, our minds go to, oh, you know, it's diet. They should be eating the yogurt that they eat in the country of Georgia, that valley where everyone lives to be a hundred. Or it's socialization like in Okinawa, where everybody has this kind of social context. But it wasn't. It was they talk to themselves out loud. 

Carrie: They do that?

Tim: Yes, exactly. Even in the grocery shop, in public, they talk to themselves out loud. And his conclusion was actually just like what I said, it provides a kind of grounding so that you're not trapped there inside your own head. But what is really interesting about that is it suggests that the narrative we tell ourselves when we're trapped in our own head is capable of making us ill. And in fact, is capable of making us ill in serious ways over time, obviously. But we're talking about things that are habitual now, so they're going to happen over time. 

Carrie: Interesting. 

Megan: I love it. It's just all the things that you can research, right? I'm like, I love that people research things. I hope it doesn't go away entirely in the US, but yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. There was one more thing in the book that was all related to the same kinds of things that I saw today that you mentioned. A blogger who said that she prefers to journal on her computer because she can type much faster than she can write by hand. And so fast she said that I don't have to think. 

And so, this reminds me of our relationship to Gen AI. The easier something becomes, the less we have to think. So, I mean, I think we've already been talking about this, but what are we losing when we only type versus at least doing some writing by hand? 

Tim: Many, many things. So, if you start at the earliest age, for example, then one of the things that is actually so well established that it appeared in a Scientific American article, I think, 11 years ago, and then essentially it reappeared last year with the writer saying, you know what? We said this 10 years ago, and people still aren't listening. 

And that is that we tend to talk about the relationship between the brain and the body as if the brain is higher and superior and smarter, and the body is just like the meat puppet that does whatever the brain says. And that means that we massively underestimate the value of things that we do with our bodies, things that we learn by hand. 

And actually, if you talk to people, you'll say, do you learn better by reading or watching or by doing? And they'll say, oh, I learned better by doing. And the reason is that when you have a child who is learning to read and write, if they're learning on a keyboard, their motor involvement is actually virtually identical, depending whatever letter they're typing. 

It's exactly the same movement. Whereas if they're learning to write by reading and by writing, then the visual cortex and the motor cortex they're both paying attention to what you see and the act and the sensations of that act. 

And so, when a child learns only with a keyboard, they are much more prone to mistake similar looking letters like a B and a D, for example, where you've got a vertical line and then you've got a loop and it goes one side or the other, but paying attention to which side or the other, that requires an extra level of vigilance and attention. 

Whereas if you're writing it, then you are creating that movement, and you're doing it probably repetitively, so your muscles are remembering that movement in association with that letter. And it's things like that. And the fact that, for example, when you take notes. 

One of my friends and followers at the Endangered Alphabets is a very senior guy at Google, and most of his colleagues are younger than him. And when they're in meetings, he says they're all on their tablets, or not even on their tablets, they're all having the stuff in the meeting automatically transcribed. And he's taking notes by hand. 

And the fact is that because when you write by hand, your hand moves slower than your brain, you're automatically making decisions about what to include and what not to include, and how one thing connects with another thing, and what the most important elements are, and how to kind of prioritize them. 

So, all of that process of actually starting to make sense of and make decisions about and process what's going on, it happens because you can't write as fast as everything's happening. And so, consequently, you retain all of that because you've processed it. 

You've thought about it, you've made decisions, you may even have changed one or two of the words because you're summing something up. And so, all of those faculties are engaged in ways that aren't if all you're doing is you are being like the person who turns the machine on at the beginning of the meeting and off at the end of the meeting. 

And in fact, again, seeing these Grammarly ads, one of the things they say is you can keep up even if you miss that class or even if you don't go to that meeting. And I'm thinking, what are you suggesting here? You're suggesting, yeah, it's okay to miss this meeting or miss this class. 

Carrie: Yeah, that is what they're suggesting. And I find it abhorrent. 

Megan: Just removing the human completely, right?

Tim: Exactly.

Carrie: They're really trying. They're really trying. 

Tim: And actually, this business of removing the human is really part of the bigger picture. And this notion of disembodiment, the fact that so many of the practices as well as the tools that we are moving towards, actually have the effect of removing either the individual's involvement or the individual's involvement with other individuals. 

So, I was thinking about the fact that the Postal Service is suffering in many countries because so much more of its work is being done electronically. And in there, there are some of the countries where I've got followers, where they say, don't mail me anything because it just doesn't work. 

So, what I'm remembering is when I was a kid, I used to love when we had a letter post because, first of all, you got to lick the stamp. And then when I was really small, my mother would pick me up, and I would pop it into the letterbox, or we would go into the corner shop, which had, this is a very English thing. 

It's a newsagent, tobacconist, sweet shop, whatever. And in the corner is the post office. And that's still very much a thing. And so, you talk to someone, and they talk to you, and you talk to other people in the queue as you're waiting for this to happen. And you actually see this kind of big, thick book of stamps open up and you say, oh, I want one of those. 

And it is a human event. It's not even just a human event between you, the writer of the letter, and the recipient of the letter. It's a human event, really, within many of the people in your community. And if your community is simply your relationship with your device, then you've disembodied all of those relationships, and it's now just you and your screen. 

Carrie: Yes. We got to get more people back into our lives. And, yeah, speaking of, Canada Post was on strike, off and on, rolling strikes for the past few months. I think they're finally back to work fully. So, yeah, definitely been suffering. And I just wish we would see it as a service as opposed to something that's supposed to make money, because it's not. It's not FedEx. It's its own thing. 

Tim: Right. Yes, if you start asking the question, what does a community consist of, and what holds it together, and what are its benefits as opposed to how can I do this as quickly as possible?  

Carrie: Speaking of, I did a little research before. Like, I took a silly quiz, I was like, can you read cursive writing? I don't know why I took it, I know I can. But I also found this business called Handwritten, and instead of an I, it's a Y. And what they do is they have a bunch of custom handwritten fonts, and they have robots that hold pens and send handwritten letters. But do you need an even greater level of authenticity? Handwritten can replicate your handwriting and signature. After a one-time fee, your handwriting will be available wherever and however you use Handwritten. 

Tim: Yeah, so two things about that right away. One is that it shows how our notion of the legal relationship between ourselves and our writing has completely changed. So, there used to be a time where the way we would demonstrate the veracity of a document was by signing it because we assumed that everybody's signature was different. 

Whereas now what they're really saying is all of that is gone. And we can reproduce your signature plus those little points of sale things you do with a fingertip. It doesn't matter what your signature looks like. So, all of that's been removed. 

But the other thing that goes along with what you were saying is again, I was doing some research for the book, and I came across this fascinating little video story on the BBC news video where it begins with this journalist saying I have terrible handwriting, I wish I could get someone else to do my writing for me, maybe I can. 

And so, he actually researched one of these things that you're talking about. This particular one was called Hemingway, and it was a device that it would scan and read your handwriting, and then it would write other things in your handwriting. And he was like, oh, this is great, now I don't have to do it. 

So, of course, he went along to the company, and we see the machine doing the writing. And then everything fell apart because he got a handwriting expert to come in and look at a sample of his handwriting and then a sample of his handwriting as reproduced by this machine, Hemingway. 

And the purpose was really to see whether the expert could tell the difference. So, the first thing was the expert absolutely, totally could see the difference. And he was like, yeah, this is really mechanical. This is clearly the machine. There's no variety in it whatsoever. It is really cold, it's dead. 

And so, that was the first torpedo into this story. The second torpedo was that the graphologist then completely off his own bat, said, by the way, your handwriting is really interesting. I love it. You do this. It's really creative, blah, blah, blah. 

And nobody had ever told this journalist that his handwriting was interesting or attractive or whatever. And he had so taken on board this mythology that his handwriting was hideous, that when this guy said this, he didn't know what to say, and he basically fell apart, and the segment ended. 

And it really goes back to what you said at the beginning of the show, which is that I was looking at my handwriting and kind of going, this is awful. And if I can quote myself, the first sentence of the book By Hand, is, this story begins with two photos and with shame. 

And the photos were my handwriting in 1980, before I actually spent 20 years working on a computer, and then my handwriting in 1999. But the shame thing, everybody I talked to, bar maybe two people, were essentially ashamed of their handwriting. 

And yet, I would bet. I mean, Carrie, you've been saying my handwriting is awful, blah, blah, blah. I would bet that if you joined in my handwriting contest, I'm getting people to send me postcards, which they write in. And one of the things that is so fascinating about this is that I've received a bunch of postcards now, and none of them is illegible. 

None of them is even what I would call ugly or whatever. It's simply that they're all different. And the more you're used to seeing stuff in type or on a screen where everything is so even and where every time there's a letter G, it looks exactly the same, just like these handwriting experts said. If that's what we are used to, then we are already kind of disqualifying ourselves. 

Carrie: Yeah. Yep. Similar studies on listening to more accents gets you more used to them so you can understand them better. Like, see, being exposed to different varieties of handwriting. You just get used to it. 

Tim: Yeah. 

Megan: People have told me that my handwriting is illegible. I'm just going to say it's not just me.  

Tim: Megan, what you say about this business of the ability to make sense of complex visual information, that's one of the things that makes your brain better. Your brain actually wants to be able to explore and to process, and to make sense of things. And essentially, again, this business of what kind of life are we setting up for ourselves by moving into this. This whole kind of tool generation. It's as if what we really want is never to have to do anything.

Carrie: Yes. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: I mean, their own examples are things like, oh, it'll research and buy a plane ticket for you, or order pizza for you. I mean, the second one's not that hard, and the first one's more hard. But it's also kind of fun to figure out, like, what's the best way to get there, like why do I want to offload that to a machine? 

Carrie: Right. And in fact, I came across one that said this generative AI will write your novel for you. All you have to do is do some research to find out which genres are selling better right now. I'm thinking, what do you want to do with your life that you would take the pleasure and challenge of writing a novel and saying, I'll get the robot to do that. 

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, I'm not a creative writer. I could not possibly do it. But I imagine that if I were that kind of writer, yeah, no. I absolutely would not want someone to do it, and I don't want a machine to do it for me because I don't think it will be good. I know it won't be. But if that were my job, no, absolutely not. 

Megan: Your voice is not there. Where's your voice? 

Carrie: No. And all the interesting things about plot that comes from human brains, a computer could never. 

Tim: Right, and there's an interesting analogy here to knitting. So, knitting has undergone this kind of revolution. As a traditional manual skill, it kind of declined and declined. And then again, it's a gendered thing. Mostly, women kind of went, no, I actually enjoy knitting. 

And if you were to say, so you realize there are knitting machines that will do that for you. You kind of go, so you want to take away the pleasure I get from knitting and from coming up with my own patterns and deciding who is going to want what colors and all that kind of thing. 

Not to mention the fact that knitting, like doodling, actually has some really interesting brain activity values. If people doodle, this is the kind of research I did. If people doodle during a really, really dull lecture, they actually retain more of the content than if they don't. And likewise, if people knit, they're sort of parking a set of their activities over here, and it leaves their brain free to do all kinds of interesting things over here. 

Megan: Hey, Carrie, what are you knitting right now? What are you knitting right now? 

Carrie: I'm crocheting a sweater.

Megan: Oh, okay. Okay.

Carrie: Yeah, yeah. So, I used to doodle, and then, yeah, I don't know. Twelve years ago, I started to knit. And then during the pandemic, I learned to crochet. And it does help. I can concentrate. I have these really boring meetings at work. Sorry to my workplace. But sometimes they're just really boring. But I can actually concentrate if I've got either knitting or crocheting with me. 

Tim: Yes. Yeah, it's kind of like a fidget. You know those fidget toys. 

Carrie: It's similar. Yeah.

Tim: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah, I've seen people at conferences now they're bringing their knitting, and that's great. 

Tim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. They have the whole time I've been at conferences. 

Megan: Oh, really?

Carrie: Yeah, yeah.

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: But I think it's probably more now. There's more people now. 

Tim: And when you say there's more people now, I think that there is a kind of the leading edge of this kind of retro adventure where people are deciding I'm actually going to read a book as opposed to reading on my Kindle. I'm actually going to find myself a nice, quiet space and make that a priority, rather than saying, how fast can I do that? 

The analogy I make in the book is to the slow food movement, where it's like, if you cook something for 24 hours, it's actually going to be better for the entire food chain. It's going to be better for you. It is a much more intentional way of spending your time, and it's a more intentional way of having a relationship with food and with the ecosystem. 

Megan: Oh, yeah. 

Carrie: Absolutely.

Megan: My mom, she'll make homemade pinto beans, and she's not switching to an Instant Pot. She still takes hours to make homemade pinto beans. 

Carrie: I do love the Instant Pot. It's a good piece of technology. It's a good tool.

Tim: That may be where we need to head is to sort out the distinction between the tools we use and the tools that use us. 

Carrie: Yeah, we do. Absolutely. And now that I have this framework in my brain, I'm definitely going to start doing. Like, I've been thinking more and more that I really need more analog stuff in my life. Like, I never switched to a Kindle. I always read physical books. 

I read a couple of books on my phone, which was not good. But, like, music. Music has become so annoying now. So, I'm like, do I just go back to getting a record player? I don't like having all the stuff, though. That's the only issue. Because every time you move, it's more stuff. 

Tim: Right, right.

Carrie: Oh, it's a better experience. 

Tim: It seems to me that we're at a kind of tipping point where you no longer know whether the music you're listening to was actually created by humans or by AI. 

Carrie: That too.

Tim: And the not knowing comes hand in hand with not caring. And that also then leads to all sorts of things like job loss, economic dependency, all of those grim things that we're told if you work more efficiently using AI, you can spend your time better doing other things. It's like, what about all the people who were working on those things manually and have lost their jobs? One of whom maybe you. 

Carrie: Yeah. I think there's going to be a real pushback on all of this stuff because people are getting angry, and it's at least for now, the AI output is shit. Like, it's slop, and it makes us deeply uncomfortable. So, I'm hoping that we're going to push back and come together and decide human only. 

Human-manufactured. We're going to slow things down, because this is ridiculous. All this is doing is making some billionaires, even more billionaire or trillionaires. And no, we don't need to do that. We don't need to make their lives better. We can make our own lives better by coming together. 

Tim: So, I've got an interesting metaphor for you. A number of years ago, I was visiting my family in England, and I went into this mall in Bristol, and it was one of these malls which is essentially like a giant atrium with levels, with like four levels, maybe five. 

And there was music coming out of the sound system. And you expect pipe music in a mall. And after a while, I realized that there was actually a guy who was sitting on a chair on the ground floor playing and singing into mics that were tapped into the sound system. And on the one hand, it meant that everybody could hear him. 

And the graphic equalization was great, and his voice sounded good, et cetera, et cetera. But next to him, he had a table with a bunch of CDs, as people did in those days, right? And nobody was buying them because nobody realized that he was the person singing through the sound system. And they were just walking past him as if he were one of the giant animatronic mice or whatever.  

Megan: Chuck E. Cheese.

Carrie: Yes. 

Tim: And so he had become disembodied, even though he was actually there. 

Megan: Yeah. Wow. 

Carrie: Well, you've given us a lot to think about. We went in a lot of different directions. But I'm so happy that to have you on again for a second time. This was fascinating. 

Megan: I know. We could talk to you forever. 

Carrie: Yeah, seriously. 

Megan: Yeah. You are a gem, Tim Brookes. You're a gem. 

Tim: Yeah.

Carrie: But we always leave our listeners with one final message. Don't be an asshole.

Megan: Don't be an asshole. 

Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Vocal Fries Pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com, and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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