"Torah scrolls, written by hand, contain 304,805 letters and may take more than a year to produce. If a single mistake is made, the entire scroll becomes invalid."
THE INTELLECTUAL DEVOTIONAL
David S. Kidder & Noah D. Oppenheim
Penmanship changes with age and also from disuse. More people are dependent upon computers, iPads or iPhones, none of which require physical writing. Letters, term papers, and documents may originate in long hand writing, but usually, these items are eventually printed by printers attached to computers.
If first attempts at writing are a first draft, one is not as careful in forming the alphabetical letters contained within words. Grammar tends to be not as accurate to say nothing of the lapse in sentence structure. Spell check catches such errors and we are less dependent upon our own accuracy.
The passion for writing becomes more challenging when the writer is required to start all over when a mistake is made. Not just discarding one sentence or one paragraph or one page, but everything. Just the thought of beginning over and over is overwhelming. What about smeared ink? What about skipping a word? No allowance for human error? How about daily disruptions . . . feeding the family, phone answering, or bathroom breaks? What happens when a pen runs out of ink and the color is no longer matched? Can the writer insert substitutions if the language is unclear?
A day of gratitude and thanksgiving has been declared for my thesaurus. I am deeply appreciative of modern technology and my freedom of speech. I am blessed by the flow of words streaming through me and I am honored for the unknown kindred spirits reading this page. I am totally in awe of the long line of generations of writers spanning across all of time enabling creative expression.
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