I’ve been writing at best sporadically the past few days, experimenting with something that I really haven’t done much of, and that’s composing in a notebook.
I generally compose on the computer because my advisor for my dissertation program strongly encouraged this. I like composing on the computer because of my anal-retentive tendencies which get riled up by editing on paper. I hate scribbles. I hate white-out. I hate crossing things out neatly. And forget about pencils, because they smear. I want a pristine page with pretty handwriting, and I will tear out a page and rewrite if that’s what it takes. I waste a lot of time and a lot of paper.
Hence, my consumer experiment. I have a Moleskine+ pen I bought with a settlement from Barnes and Noble a few years ago. The original pen didn’t function well, so I just got a replacement that does work. This pen, plus a proprietary marked notebook from Moleskine, allows one to write while the camera in the pen records keystrokes, and these pages can be digitized through OCR and sent to Dropbox (or other places) to be repaired as needed — the OCR is not perfect, but it handles my idiosyncratic writing well.
So let me lay out the advantages and disadvantages of this:
Advantages:
- The pen writes smooth as butter
- The notebook is pretty
- Will digitize several pages at a time.
- Decent handwriting recognition
- Relatively robust iPhone app
- The pen requires charging
- The notebooks cost $27 apiece; there are no cheaper options
- Scribbles — even more disconcerting because they’re in a pretty notebook
- Reusable, and therefore less expensive
- Better designed for use as a tool and not a permanent record
- Can use with more than one pen as long as it’s Flexion
- Could make mistakes and erase using liquid
- Flexion pens don’t write as solidly as other pens
- Flexion pens can feel scratchy (at least on paper)
- Scanning must be done one page at a time.
Words Like Me 