cashew | Monday, August 15th, 2022

First, I will give you that the ballpoint offered some very useful traits: dry-out resistant ink, ability to write upside-down, water-resistant ink. The fact that these traits exist means that other pens had to up their game to be able to compete, sure, but...

Pencil already does everything the ballpoint can do. The only difference is that pencil can be erased and the ballpoint cannot. So the only time to choose ballpoint over pencil is in the special case where one needs the writing to be permanent and...
DOCUMENT INK is permanent ink. It will bind to the plant fibers in the paper and won't fade with time. And what specific conditions will you need to use permanent ink? A few off the top of my head:
- Signing legal documents - which I doubt you'd be doing in the rain and sleet and snow. Most likely, you'll be in a house or at least inside an enclosure, away from the elements, at a desk and thus a fountain pen will serve your purposes just fine.
- Archival manuscripts - Will most likely not be copying these things by hand, and if you do, most will go to a calligrapher who will be using dip pens anyway, so no ballpoints here.
- Ticketing? OK, maybe this is a good place to use ballpoints. Now how many of you are police officers?
- Banking - again, banks used to have fountain pens attached to their desks with little pots of ink that gets refilled at night. I'm sure it costs the institution less money to attach a 50-cent Bic to the tables instead, but in terms of customer convenience it's pretty much the same.
- Test taking - and yet, we happily accept pencil on math tests, scantrons, etc. Why must we use ink? I'm genuinely confused, because it's not like the students are going to break into our offices and steal their tests and change the answers. I guess you can argue that it prevents the teachers from changing the student's answers...but, again, we already accept math tests to be completed in pencil, so there's honestly no excuse for not accepting pencil on a test.
The claim that ballpoints don't leak is a lie. I don't know what kind of amazing ballpoints BBC are using, but my ballpoints have definitely leaked and gotten oily messes all over my papers. The rolling mechanisms also sometimes stop working completely because the manufacturing margin of error is so small for the ball mechanism to successfully roll the oil paste, so I've had to ditch entire pens even though I've only used up about half of the ink.
The mass adoption of ballpoints is directly correlated to the decrease in penmanship. You might argue that we don't need penmanship anymore in the digital age, but penmanship isn't just about "looking good". Writing is such an inherent, physical aspect of our learning that the practice of handwriting and paying attention to penmanship helps the student to improve all aspects of their education, including the practice of paying attention, patience, and thinking over their words twice before committing things to paper. And when the writer can look at a page of pretty words they've written, it gives them a nice dopamine shot of happiness compared to seeing a page of chicken scratch. If we want to encourage more handwriting, we should definitely switch to tools that will help improve penmanship.
- Caveat: No, switching to a fountain pen will not magically make your handwriting better unless you've already practice your penmanship. However, for anyone who have practice penmanship, it's noticeably easier to write better when using a fountain pen compared to using a ballpoint. The rolling mechanism in ballpoints gets in the way of more precise fine motor control.

To conclude, while I'm glad that the ballpoint has forced fountain pens to become less leaky, more resilient, and generally cheaper for students, I can't say that writing has been changed by the wide adoption of ballpoints at the industrial level. At least not in a good way. Our writing is uglier and our plastic waste has gone through the roof. I don't think the ballpoint was a net positive. I just can't in good conscience praise the ballpoint.