I think people spent more time to get the same amount of words in the quill pen age. And I do think you just end up with a different kind of writing. One of m

I think people spent more time to get the same amount of words in the quill pen age. And I do think you just end up with a different kind of writing. One of my favorite early-America authors is Washington Irving. In "A Tour of the Prairies," he writes about an explorer getting sprayed by a skunk. Wryly Irving writes something like "the surrounding air was filled with fragrance." You can almost feel him sitting there with his quill pen, pausing to choose the perfect, grandest possible way to describe it. I think that's how I'd characterize pre-word processor writing. Since the whole process was slower, there was perhaps more intentionality in each individual word, resulting in more compact but more intense sentences. Fun fact: The first novel written on a typewriter was: Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer." (1876)