Why I Prefer Writing with an Apple Pencil over Typing on a Keyboard
The creativity of writing by hand combined with the benefits of technology
By Rob Sturgeon
I’m not one of those people who maintain that an eBook reader can never replace the tactile feel of a paper book. I don’t talk endlessly about how good paper smells, and I don’t stack shelves with books I’ll never read. I don’t even have a pen and paper notebook close at hand to jot down quick notes.
I was always firmly on the opposing side of the argument, happy to sync notes between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Despite being happy with the features that smart devices and the internet have brought to the note-taking process, I still felt somewhat held back from brainstorming on a computer. This became much more obvious when I decided to keep a learning log of skills I gain as an iOS developer. Suddenly I found myself staring at a blank Google Doc, rehearsing an opening line in my head, and deciding against it before the words even make it to the virtual page.
When people take handwritten notes, perhaps during a meeting or after a sudden moment of creative inspiration, it often becomes necessary to ‘type them up.’ While notes on paper are a ‘rough draft,’ the typed version will be carefully written and probably edited many times. It may be published, emailed, printed, or posted online.
Technology has allowed us to copy our words infinitely and spread it broadly.
This means we have to type our words carefully.
I still get a sense that typing something is somehow making a final and definitive version. Perhaps it doesn’t help that Microsoft Word still uses the Times New Roman font by default, a font developed for The Times newspaper as a way to convey its authority as a source of truth to the masses. Being able to see your writing appear on a virtual page as if it’s already printed is a wonder that would amaze anyone from the age of the typewriter, but it adds to that illusion that what you write should be ready to print.
Research by Princeton University and UCLA has shown that students who make handwritten notes learn more, and the researchers claim that this is due to the fact that writing by hand is harder. This might come as a surprise to people who already prefer writing by hand, as scrawling a note can be done quickly without the possibility of making a typo. But it may be the case that actually forming the letters yourself, rather than pressing keys the location of which you memorized long ago, engages the brain more fully. The brains of 5-year-olds who couldn’t even write yet were found in research by Indiana University to have far more neural activity after learning to write letters than those that only looked at letters.
Similar research mentioned in the same article showed that children wrote more words and expressed more ideas when writing by hand.
Research such as this has been around for a while, but I was still unwilling to start writing notes by hand. Why? I’m disorganized. If I have a notebook, there’s a high likelihood that I’ll put it down somewhere random and not be able to find it later. If I need to find something in an old notebook, my chance of finding that one is even lower. What I love about digital notes is the ability to search every note I’ve ever written, and find the exact line of the exact paragraph where I expressed that sentiment. I could throw a notebook away, or it could become damaged and I would lose access to the only copy of what I wrote.
Bringing technology to handwriting
Recognizing the potential value of writing by hand for creativity and learning, I still needed a technological solution that could modernize the medium.
Products like the Moleskine Pen+ Ellipse are real pens that let you write on paper, while the content of what you write gets wirelessly transmitted to a companion app. This could be great, except that the pen is $129 and requires a ‘paper tablet’ notebook that costs at least $29 every time you need a new one. Although the pen comes with an ink refill, I could not find out whether it requires special ink or refills that only they make. I assume that refilling the ink would be a somewhat tedious process, should you be able to find out how to do it.
The Neo smartpen M1+ has an identical cost, but at least that company directs you towards PDFs of the ‘Ncoded paper technology’ that you can print yourself.
Moleskine makes a variety of smart notebooks too, which allow you to take a photo with your smartphone and the app will clean up the image and save it to a cloud service of your choice. When these notebooks came out I was somewhat interested, but the chore of needing to take a photo of every page of a notebook with relatively small pages dissuaded me from even trying it out. I knew that a notebook page would need to feel worth the effort, and many of my notes would be forgotten and unsearchable as a result.
Introducing the Apple Pencil
When the Apple Pencil was announced in 2015, many critics pointed to the words of Steve Jobs when he was announcing the original iPhone in 2007.
STEVE JOBS: We don’t wanna carry around a mouse, right? So what are we gonna do? Oh a stylus, right? We’re gonna use a stylus! No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get ’em and put ’em away and you lose ’em, YUCK! Nobody wants a stylus.
Since Steve Jobs died, devotees frequently point to quotes like this as a sign that Apple has strayed too far from Steve’s original vision. This is a somewhat frustrating tendency, as Apple has built its business on carefully choosing when a technology is ready to make its way into a product. The iPhone launched without third-party apps, as Jobs was worried about damaging the stability of the platform and infecting it with viruses.
However, a year later the App Store launched, and Jobs clearly thought that the time was right to change his opinion.
The reasoning for his opinion on styluses (I refuse to say styli) is perhaps better shown in an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the D8 conference in 2010.
STEVE JOBS: What I remember telling you on the tablet was that handwriting was probably the slowest input method ever invented, and that it was doomed to failure. Well what we tried to do was reimagine the tablet. In other words, I think Microsoft did a lot of interesting work on the tablet. What we’ve done is not to compete with what they did, we reimagined it and what we’re doing is completely different from what they did.
They’re completely stylus-based for ten years, and what we said at the very beginning was if you need a stylus you’ve already failed, and that drove everything. Their tablet PC was based on a PC, had all the expense of a PC, had the battery life of a PC, had the weight of a PC, it used a PC operating system that really needed the precision of the tip of an arrow of a cursor. Well the minute you throw a stylus out, you cannot get that precision, you have the precision of a finger which is much cruder. Therefore you need to have totally different software, so you can’t use a PC operating system, and you have to bite the bullet and say we’re going to have to create this from scratch because the PC apps won’t work anyway.
I hope this makes it clearer about the historical context of his comments. As I stated earlier, the fact that handwriting is slower can actually be an advantage, but that doesn’t mean you want it to be the only input method available to you. The Apple Newton was a stylus-based device made after Steve Jobs was pushed out of the company, and he ended the product line as soon as he returned in 1997.
It’s easy to see how the handwriting recognition on Newton was flawed and the on-screen keyboard was small.
The success of the original iPhone ushered in an age of touch interaction that led to the smartphones we all know and love today. This was what Jobs wanted to achieve: a new way of interacting with a device, that didn’t require a stylus to make it work. In that second quote, he talked about a PC operating system requiring the precision of a cursor that only a stylus or mouse can provide. I was happy to get my first touchscreen Windows laptop in 2018, but I was disappointed that many apps have buttons so small that only a cursor can touch them.
With Apple Pencil, iPadOS offers a choice of input methods where all buttons can be tapped with a finger or stylus.
Now that iPadOS has added mouse support, we have a third option.
But the circular cursor provides the ‘much cruder’ precision that Jobs wanted as the basis of the operating system.
Why I started writing with Apple Pencil
I don’t own an iPad Pro, so I had to wait until 2019 to get a standard iPad that supported Apple Pencil. I like drawing on my iPad, but I was never happy with the ‘passive’ styluses that are essentially just a piece of metal with a rubber tip that attempts to imitate the electrical conductivity of a human finger. I knew that Apple Pencil could detect the angle for shading with the side of the tip, and the active tracking allows the screen to react with such low latency that drawing feels natural.
Even so, I was never going to buy a more expensive iPad Pro just for the ability to buy a $129 stylus that was compatible with it.
I traded in my 2017 iPad, unfortunately, the last iPad to lack Pencil support, and this more than covered the cost of the $99 1st generation Apple Pencil that I needed for the 2019 model.
I decided to research apps for writing text on iPad, as I thought this would add more value to the expensive stylus. I found that the Nebo app showed the most promise. Instead of just recognizing the text that you write and making it searchable like many other apps do, Nebo has some really interesting gestures that feel like superpowers. For instance, I have a tendency to scrawl the occasional word illegibly, and on paper, I’ve always scribbled them out and rewritten them. Sometimes I don’t realize how illegible a word is until I’ve already written more words, and this means I have to scribble out the word and rewrite it in the small space above it on the same line.
If I want to add a sentence to the middle of a paragraph on paper, I may need to cross out the entire paragraph and rewrite it.
Nebo solves both of these problems in an amazing way. Scribble out or draw a line through a word or even a single letter and it will vanish. Need to add text? Drawing a single vertical line downwards between letters creates a space while drawing the doing the same between words will add a line break. After creating space and writing what you want to insert, drawing a vertical line upwards will remove any spaces or line breaks and move your handwritten text back together as if no edit ever occurred.
Every paragraph that you write has a small preview above it that will guess what words you are writing as you are writing them. This reduces the likelihood that errors will occur should you wish to convert your handwriting to plain text, as you can spot an incorrectly guessed word, cross it out and rewrite it. Tapping the words Nebo is guessing brings up a list of other suggestions, and you can add unusual words to the dictionary so that they have a better chance of being recognized in the future.
Most of the time your handwriting will be recognized with amazing accuracy, so these corrections don’t need to be done often.
Check out Nebo’s website for more information about the features the app provides.
When I started writing my learning log with an Apple Pencil, I discovered that the same creativity that the research had mentioned. Mainly I find that there is a sense of ‘flow’ where starting to write a sentence leads to an internal monologue that keeps up the momentum for successive sentences. A matte screen protector may make the iPad slightly rougher to the touch, but I found that adding one gave the Apple Pencil the friction that a real pen gets on paper. Without it, the Apple Pencil tapping against the glass is quite loud, and the experience doesn’t replicate paper anywhere near as much.
Double-tapping a paragraph with the Pencil converts it to text that you can then edit using the keyboard as you would in any notes app. Alternatively, you can export from Nebo straight to a PDF or Microsoft Word document, leaving your original handwriting intact. Organize your notes into notebooks, and organize your notebooks into themed collections. Nebo supports a variety of cloud platforms for backing up, including Google Drive and Dropbox, and of course, your handwritten notes are completely searchable whether you convert them to plain text or not.
I hope that you consider writing with Apple Pencil too. I know the cost of a compatible iPad and the stylus itself is high compared to stationary, but an iPad obviously has many other capabilities besides writing. Since multiple apps can be opened side-by-side in Split View, you can make handwritten notes from an article, document, or even a YouTube video. When I write on my iPad, I feel like my notes won’t be left behind, lost, or ignored. I feel like I have the superpower to completely erase mistakes, insert whole sentences in the middle of paragraphs, and get a real text document at the end of it.
The 2019 iPad is still the cheapest way to get your first Apple Pencil, and I definitely think it’s worth it.
Rob Sturgeon is a placement app developer at the educational publisher Twinkl. He works on iOS and Android apps that bring AR to classrooms.