Day 41: scribe

Have you ever thought about how much it must have sucked to be a scribe?
Like waaaaay back when.
When they did calligraphy and wrote with quills and ink.

I took handwritten notes for the first time in a long the other day.
It sucked.
I was writing in pen because I hate pencil and I kept spelling things wrong, or it looked messy. Being the perfectionist I am, I kept starting the same notes over until they were legible.

It got me thinking about how my parents never used a laptop to take notes.
It also got me to thinking about how pencils and even some pens can erase their mistakes, a quill and ink can't.

It must have been awful to be a scribe. Every word had to be perfect. It had to be evenly spaced and legible and beautiful. And these people weren't writing nursery rhymes, they were writing heavy duty books like the Bible.If you made one mistake it was ruined and and you had to start over.
But they were also probably so much more careful with their words. Because once they were written, they couldn't press a backspace button.
They also probably valued the final outcome so much more, simply because of the effort put in.
It's kind of poetic, in a way.

But for my sanity in the classroom, I am so thankful for my laptop. It spell checks my words, spaces out each letter and word perfectly, and I can make the words look beautiful with just a few clicks.
Crisp and clean when printed.
Very handy. much better than my chicken scratch hand written notes.