A generation of typers, not writers

Exams are over, thankfully, leaving the weekend and remaining days of the summer totally free to engage in the night time leisure economy*.

* the academic term for for "heavy, heavy drinking".

For my first exam, I sat and wrote for two and a half hours flat spanning over nine pages for three questions. My hand by the end of it was in agony, visibly shaking and a pain in my upper arm was dull and concentrated along the outer face.

After the exam, a few of us went for coffee to debrief each other and to discuss what we wrote and the topics we covered. Three of the five there, including me, could barely move their writing hand and the remaining three mentioned that their hands, wrists and arms were hurting on varying degrees.

At what point, exactly, did this age range of technologically minded and concentrated students become degenerationalised and grown up to be more primitive in the writing department?

The corners of our thumbs, where we use to write text messages on either T9 compatible or scaled-down QWERTY keyboards are hardened, and the one defining feature of our evolutionary excellence is that we can use such extremeties to communicate on the level that we do.

But writing the same number of words with a pen and paper compared to the same number of words in an email or a text message - one notices almost how monotonous, slow, inefficient and energy consuming it is.

It just makes you think that my generation are almost predisposed to be better at typing than writing. It's a bit of a scary thought, really.