I showed my students some of my 4x6 notecards -- with citations (typed or photocopied), colorful notes, comments and source details. I felt very old-fashioned. I do compose at the computer, but after lengthy card shuffling and outlining and thinking. my disseration was laid out chapter by chapter in subject rows on the air hockey table.
Personally, I find it much easier to write on the computer, because I am a very fast typist and my handwriting can't keep up with my brain. That said, I've found that when I get truly stuck on something, I have to go somewhere quiet with just a notebook and a pen, and often that's what gets me unstuck. (Recently I sketched out an entire summer project for a student this way....I spent weeks mulling over the problem and making no progress. One morning I couldn't sleep, so I got up early, got out my notebook, and the ideas just flowed.) Perhaps it's just the absence of distractions: when you just have a pen and paper, you have to write, but when you have your laptop, you can play games, surf the web, etc....
It's great to read about other people's writing process because I'm kind of lost myself. Being a lit student in college, I don't really know the best way to write. I'm still in the process of finding a system that suits me the most. I think I enjoy writing by hand a lot more than typing on the computer, especially when I'm just taking notes, brainstorming, trying to come up with something to say. With a pen and a piece of paper, I can draw charts and lines, and it feels like I'm in complete control--I can do whatever I want, it's direct, from me to the paper. Of course, you can draw lines and charts on computer too but it's not as fast, not as spontaneous. Besides, I love the feeling of writing on paper and seeing my handwriting--it's a lot more personal than just a standardized font on the computer.
Having said that, when it comes to writing the actual draft, not just outlining, I prefer using the computer. It's way faster and neater. And with paper deadlines, it seems almost impossible to write notes, brainstorm, and outline by hand, but when I do these things on computer, I tend to get bored, lose my energy, and stressed out, for no apparent reason--so I don't really know what to do. So that's my problem, I guess, with writing academic papers.
As for creative writing, it's a completely different terrain, not to say that I've mastered the process--far from it. Speaking of which, on the subject of writing, what's everyone's process of writing a creative piece like? It seems to me that people are mostly talking about academic writing.
I majored in English so I wrote lots of papers, and my experience was almost identical to what Aurix just described. Brainstorming and making outlines is difficult for me to do on a computer. But once I know what I'm going to write, I have to be in front of the computer. (Of course the idea of doing everything longhand is completely alien to me. I'm 26 years old. My first computer was a Commodore C64, and in the days of Windows 3.1 I was the kid the neighbors called to solve their computer issues.)
I can relate to the feeling that my hand can't write things down as fast as my mind can dictate them, and the result of that is that when you really get on a roll you can lose some of the jewels because you didn't get them on paper before they slipped away. That doesn't happen when you're using a computer, as long as you're a fast typist. (I also agree that keyboarding was the most useful course I took in high school.)
As for creative writing, the method I use for recording it or working it out isn't as much a factor as it is with academic writing. For me it usually depends on where I am when I start, though I've found that my thoughts are usually less restricted with a pen and paper. I can always fine-tune it on a computer later.
This is very interesting. When I was in graduate school, up until the time of my orals, all of my notes were longhand on paper. I still have my orals notes, in fact, written on yellow legal paper. Then with the dissertation, I started typing my notes into computer files, but I almost always take them long-hand first, either on a legal pad or using stickies to mark quotations in books.
I've also always printed things out in order to edit them. However, this year I was working with an honors thesis student, and in order to save time I once or twice used the track changes feature in Word to comment on her work. When I talked about that with her later, she said she much preferred that electronic version of commentary on her writing; that she would prefer to keep it all electronic until she printed out the final version, as she did all her editing on screen. Yet another small generational shift.
My process sounds very like the 8-step plan in your post.
One thing I've noticed over time (and I'm not exactly proud to admit it) is that I have all sorts of obsessive compulsive habits while composing at the computer that I can't imagine having if I wrote longhand.
For instance, when I've reached the end of a burst of writing (every fifteen or twenty minutes or so), I usually hit Print Preview for no apparent reason and scroll through the pages, looking at the way the text fits on the page. There's something about composing in a medium that already looks "typeset" that makes the draft always already seem more finished. It already looks published in some sense, and a lot of my OCD habits while word processing (like previewing, or messing with fonts, or changing margins and alignment) reflect that ambiguity.
I could go into more obsessive detail about some of my quirky writing habits, but I'll refrain. This is an interesting discussion.
I compose at the computer, for the speed-of-typing reason. My note-taking process is pretty pathetic, actually; if I own a book, I underline and write in the margins; if I don't own it I either write on post-its in the book or try to type up some main points at the end of each chapter or so. (In theory I then transcribe the post-its onto the computer, but often they end up stuck on pieces of paper when I have to return the books.) But I have to print out the various notes into hard copy to use them, and I still tend to wind up with books piled around me as I write. (I have a bunch of transcribed documents and I print them all out too, put them in binders, and flag relevant ones with yet more post-its.) When I handwrite notes, I tend to use 5 x 8 notebooks b/c that's a nice amount of information to look at, visually (an 8.5 x 11 page has too much info for me to be able to glance at it and find stuff).
But I *never* outline before I start writing - I have to spew stuff onto the page and look at it to see what I have, and then I will outline, though it's usually in a pretty general way and I'm still not especially attached to outlining. I'll do some revising on the computer, but usually I have to print the thing out and work on the hard copy, and yes, I still cut and paste in the old school way (I say it's because it's so satisfying literally to rip my prose to shreds!).
Something I've started doing again for actual formal writing (rather than notes/brainstorming) is starting a new file retyping each new draft from scratch, rather than opening the old file and making changes on that; back when I did handwrite papers and then had to type them up, I found that even when I'd heavily revised, the process of retyping the whole thing always helped me make a few further changes. (Of course, this would work much less well for an entire book, but I do it for conference papers/articles - and it would still work for a chapter, I suspect.)
I don't think I could go back to writing an entire draft longhand. (For one thing, my handwriting has gone to CRAP in the last year b/c I type almost EVERYTHING.) Sometimes in the process of revision I find myself handwriting longer passages, but if they get beyond a paragraph or so I tend to switch back to the computer. One the one hand, I think it would make me more mindful, but OTOH, I think if I slowed down to think that closely about what I was saying, I'd stymie myself. (But again, I write to figure out what I'm thinking, rather than going through much preliminary planning.)
I remember being a writing tutor in grad school and encountering my first student who really couldn't write, in the sense of drafting stuff by writing longhand. In her school system, when they did any kind of writing they got plunked in front of computers and told, "Write about your summer vacation," or whatever. She found it really really hard to compose by hand - it was just natural to her to do so on the computer. I don't think either process is inherently better, it's a question of what context you develop your skills in. (It makes me think of those students who've spent so much time in front of TV/movies that they absorb stuff really well by ear and never take notes in class. Granted, many students who never take notes should be doing so! But there are some who don't take notes and still do well. Frustrates the heck out of me.)
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