Umberto Eco mourns the death of beautiful handwriting. Norm Geras counters:
Somewhere along during my school years, I had a teacher who encouraged us not to begin writing a sentence before having it fully formed in our minds. Maybe. But whatever advantages that brings, they are as nothing compared with the advantages, due to word-processing software, of being able to amend, to reshape text, to shift things around, without having to rewrite everything. If you're a very fluent writer, you may be able to get by without this. But for those of us for whom writing is more like building something, and not a purely linear process, writing by hand can slow you down too much. My pages used to get so full of crossings out, transposition marks, arrows and what not, that I'd often have to do the whole page over again; or engage in what I used to call page surgery – cutting out the OK part and sticking it to another OK part. That kind of slowness I don't miss at all.
The Dish 