clever title here

I was recently talking with a writer friend who told me that he writes everything longhand and then later types it into his computer. I was shocked: people still do that?

I've been known to write a little longhand when the mood strikes me. When I'm out and an idea comes to me, I write it down. When I'm reading in a cafe and something comes to mind, I might write for a few minutes in my notebook. I jot things down. But a whole story? Longhand?

I can't even begin to fathom how this works. Do you write it all in one setting? Do you know how your story is going to go and write it out exactly this way? What happens if you want to insert something two pages back? How does that work?

It makes me wonder: how do the differences in the way we write influence what we write? It makes sense that there would be certain stylistic differences between something that is written longhand versus the computer. Writing longhand is inherently more deliberate. You have to both plan to write a word, think about it, and then spend the 2 seconds writing it out. On the computer, you can slap down a sentence without fully processing what you're typing. Writing on the computer encourages extra words, putting down all of one's thoughts and then editing later. Surely these two modes of composition must produce different results.

This article claims that the differences are neurological, which seems entirely logical to me. I don't know where I'm going with all of this, but I think it's really interesting. Why hasn't someone done a study on this?