I always love writing poetry out by hand. I feel like it helps me understand better, whether my own writing or someone else's. It's an intimate exercise, taking the words of John Wieners for the Hotel Wentley Poems and re-writing each poem out using Crayola marker on a page of my giant red sketch book.
I was revising a set of poems recently and decided to free myself of the word processor and re-write the whole 40-something page series out on blank scrap paper. This helped with re-arranging line break and getting to exact line spacing and placement on the page.
Therefore, it is no surprise to me that scientific studies are proving that learning to hand write things out helps with composition and understanding. Check out this fascinating article from The Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704631504575531932754922518-lMyQjAxMTAwMDAwNDEwNDQyWj.html
I was revising a set of poems recently and decided to free myself of the word processor and re-write the whole 40-something page series out on blank scrap paper. This helped with re-arranging line break and getting to exact line spacing and placement on the page.
Therefore, it is no surprise to me that scientific studies are proving that learning to hand write things out helps with composition and understanding. Check out this fascinating article from The Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704631504575531932754922518-lMyQjAxMTAwMDAwNDEwNDQyWj.html