The reasons longhand scribbles on paper make the best first-draft medium: first, those simple pages are so much less demanding than the empty windows of a text editor, with its cursor blinking like tapfoot impatience. Second, your handwriting tells a tale all on its own, provides a perfect diagnostic tool for how you really feel about the subject at issue--the leftward lean of fearfulness, forward slope of confidence, squat loops of self-indulgence. Large = excitement, small = anxiety. Et cetera.

Now, the undeviating selfstandardized script of the perfectly integrated mature human being ... I imagine there's profit in watching even that unfurling under your hand.