When I was solicited to write an article for this issue's Forum section, I had no idea where to begin. Discussion of politics all too easily draws me into tired, inexpert rhetoric, and we've all had enough of the finer points of Barack Obama's appeal to the college student in any case. The latest scandal has yet to strike our campus, and I do not yet have a complaint with the administration that might provide some entertaining rant fodder. So, recursively, I put pen to paper on putting pen to paper.Since the end of last semester, I have been exchanging letters with friends-the first time in years that, unprompted by an essay exam, I have sat down to pen anything of length rather than simply dashing off an e-mail. And I have discovered-or, more accurately, rediscovered-an interesting quirk of the literally written word. When there is no "delete" key close at hand, when prose is splashed across the page in curls of ink in a person's own unique patterns, the process of recording thought gains a sort of indelible, organic truth that typing lacks.

Even if a page is shredded and a letter restarted, the intemperate expression that perhaps prompted the abandonment of the first attempt remains in the evidence of the crumpled paper. Every slip of the pen, spelling error or lapse in logic persists, even after corrections have been implemented and final drafts drawn up.

This, combined with the fact that any editing requires considerably more effort than the perfunctory tap of a backspace, encourages a deeper level of personal commitment than the typical word-processed document. Thoughts must be weighed more carefully before their recording on paper. They flow more honestly and freely to the page than when typed in a stilting staccato to appear on a computer screen.

I kept a trip journal this summer in a location that lacked electricity, so, by necessity as well as inclination, I wrote with a pen. I noticed the same not-altogether-unpleasant uncertainty of letter-writing-constantly risking absurdity in a medium through which the self-conscious crossing-out of embarrassing errors and trite or too-true phrases remains glaringly and almost mockingly as evidence. I say this is not altogether unpleasant because when reading a journal entry or one of those letters written by a dear friend, the words possess a palpable humanity that all but the choicest e-mails lack.

And so I write this article by hand, confronting in rewrites and strikethroughs in my third-grader's scrawl, my unconscious tendency to overuse alliteration and my knack for coming off as horribly pompous. This may well be the last sample of handwriting I execute for some time; e-mail is deliciously speedy and convenient, and nobody in his right mind would shy from directly typing papers in the midst of a deluge of classwork.

But the aforementioned humanity of the handwritten is word too beguiling for me to give up writing letters. I will never attain the skill of a Sir Philip Sidney or a T.S. Eliot or any other author who has delighted us with a mastery of the personal missive.

This is immaterial, though, because I do not need their unearthly talent to see the greater truth evident in a letter that contains mistakes, difficult-to-decipher words and a gush of ideas that, for better or worse, were committed to paper inexcisably through a pen warmed by the hand of a friend. Nor do you.