\n<\/p>\n
This week it was reported that students could soon be sitting their end-of-year exams on laptops after pupils complained of hand fatigue, saying their muscles \u201care not strong enough\u201d.<\/p>\n
With Ofqual preparing to launch a public consultation on the introduction of onscreen exams, we decided to conduct a test of our own, pitting the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, a seasoned hack of the pen-and-paper generation, against George Francis Lee, our gen-Z journalist in training.<\/p>\n
Armed with only a pad, pen and a media law textbook to copy from \u2013 we set out to discover who could scribble the longest before cramp set in. It\u2019s a write-off!<\/p>\n
I take enormous pride in my ability to use a pen and paper. Though perhaps it\u2019s the most absurd thing to show off about, like flexing that you know how to desalinate sea water using only two spoons, when you have fresh running water throughout the house.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been pretending to \u201chave\u201d shorthand \u2013 it is so dumb, I even like the slightly archaic \u201chave\u201d rather than the less affected \u201ccan do\u201d \u2013 for so long I can\u2019t even remember whether it was a boast when I started lying about it. Maybe in the 90s everyone could do shorthand, the way everyone could remember their landline number. In fact, I never learned it; what I learned instead is how to write very fast, forever, in the most adverse settings.<\/p>\n
This write-off, in its climate-controlled conditions \u2013 a desk, a pen that worked, good light, a spotless notepad \u2013 should have been a personal best. I\u2019ve knelt on wet municipal paving bricks outside magistrates courts, I\u2019ve written a quote on my own hand. One time I was interviewing at an Australian speed-dating night in Alexandra Palace, ran out of paper, ripped some from the hands of a guy who\u2019d just finished snogging and as I walked off, he said \u201cbut that had her phone number \u2026 \u201d Only I can ever decipher what I\u2019ve written, which is fine, because only I need to. In that sense, it\u2019s a lot like shorthand.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Zoe Williams: \u2018It holds so much meaning for me, this writing with a pen.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n It holds so much meaning for me, this writing with a pen, and I\u2019ve been doing it so long, that naturally I am incredibly fast and good at it, except it turns out I\u2019m not. I\u2019m no faster than George, from the \u201cwhat\u2019s this thing? Which end do you use?\u201d generation; I\u2019m just much more flamboyant and triumphant when I turn the page.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that I don\u2019t get hand strain, or any of the other shooting pains that digital natives complain of, but that could equally be because all the associations I have with fast handwriting are very adrenalised: sitting exams; writing emotional letters; taking notes in my resistance-movement meetings in order to memorise then eat them. Maybe the pain happened afterwards, and I didn\u2019t notice because my elbow hurts anyway.<\/p>\n Longhand differs from a recording device, not in accuracy but in the intercession of this quaint little thing called \u201cyour brain\u201d. It can pick out immediately the interesting and unusual thing in a sea of ums and ahs and cliches. It will hear the words that make that person unlike any other person (unless they\u2019re a politician, they don\u2019t really do idiosyncrasy). As disappointed as I am, that I\u2019ve pinned my identity to handwriting only to be the same as a gen Z except messier, I will not stop doing it.<\/p>\n <\/span>Francis Lee and Williams, eyes down.<\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The ballpoint pen feels spindly in my hand and the blank, lined paper in front of me conjures up the primal fear of GCSEs. I swallow hard. It\u2019s the irrational \u201cmy entire life hinges on whatever falls upon the A4 sheet\u201d sort of dread that you don\u2019t expect to be subjected to on a random weekday afternoon.<\/p>\n I\u2019m being tested on my handwriting \u2013 to see how much I can write and how long for. Just pen and paper, old-school style \u2013 no big deal. But this feels different from pitting my wits against an exam paper. I\u2019ve been tasked with taking on a seasoned industry hack with more experience of note-taking than I do of breathing. Me, a spritely gen-Z journalist in the making, versus Guardian legend and scribbler-in-chief, Zoe Williams.<\/p>\n With the news that students in the near future may sit certain GCSE and A-level exams on a laptop because young people are losing the ability to write for long periods, a generational scribing match has been arranged to test our mettle and our hand muscles. <\/p>\n Speaking of hands, we shake ours before starting a 10-minute timer. I zoom into the preface of the 27th edition of McNae\u2019s Essential Law for Journalists and begin. Seconds pass and I can\u2019t help but see my opponent scrawling in long, bending roulettes. She moves with the speed of a 10th-century scrivener, in a script that looks as unfamiliar as Beowulf. Then I look to my page, words still on the first line, tightly formed letters distributed equally for maximum legibility.<\/p>\n <\/span>George Francis Lee: \u2018She moves with the speed of a 10th-century scrivener.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Graeme Robertson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n I hear a page turn. Somehow, I\u2019m barely a few sentences in and my foe is on a clean sheet. I shift into gear, legibility be damned. I write with reckless abandon, spilling across lines. It\u2019s probably three minutes before my hand starts to ache, not much later until it starts to properly cramp \u2013 right at that fleshy bit at the base of the thumb.<\/p>\n Another page turns. I curse McNae\u2019s, I curse not journaling more, I curse the invention of the notes app on my iPhone. I curse it all. But I push on, though not without a meek admission that my hand, indeed, hurts.<\/p>\n The timer finally rings, and I drop the pen like it\u2019s hot iron. I\u2019m surprised to find that, by the end, I\u2019d nearly caught Zoe. Still, I have lost \u2013 the competition but not the respect of my adversary, who is magnanimous in victory. Perhaps we should arrange a rematch on a smartphone, I think \u2013 or maybe I should have squeezed a bit harder during that handshake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week it was reported that students could soon be sitting their end-of-year exams on laptops after pupils complained of hand fatigue, saying their muscles \u201care not strong enough\u201d. With Ofqual preparing to launch a public consultation on the introduction of onscreen exams, we decided to conduct a test of our own, pitting the Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4542,20678,14450,741,4737,20680,1167,20679],"class_list":{"0":"post-37372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-exams","9":"tag-genz","10":"tag-guardians","11":"tag-pens","12":"tag-ready","13":"tag-scribblerinchief","14":"tag-takes","15":"tag-trainee"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}George Francis Lee, Guardian trainee<\/h2>\n