The pen may be mightier than a sword, but exactly which pen will you unsheathe in battle? Ballpoint, or fountain? Refillable cartridges or chuck-away plastic? The stationery aisle may be the favourite haunt of a teacher on summer holidays - but which pen is being put in your basket?
1. The fountain pen
Writing with a fountain pen can make you feel very important. Its flowing ink allows a beautiful cursive script, and the feeling of the nib scratching against the paper is a thing of beauty.
However, can a fountain pen stand up to the unpredictable environment of a classroom? A mere jostle at your elbow and you’ve smudged through your work. If you’re interrupted and leave the lid off, your ink dries up before the lunch bell. And heaven forfend some ne’er-do-well appears out of nowhere and, in your surprised state, you press too hard onto the page and the nib snaps! As lovely as the fountain pen is, it is possibly best left at home. Keep it for Christmas cards and letters of complaint.
SCORE: 6/10. Good for showing off; just don’t let the kids near it.
2. The ballpoint
The pen that makes primary teachers cringe. After years of perfecting handwriting with a free-flowing ink pen, students arrive at secondary, grab a ballpoint, and kiss goodbye to that handwriting practice. It is much harder to write well with a ballpoint pen. You often have to press down quite hard to get the ink out, and consequently end up with what is commonly referred to as “the claw”.
And remember that whatever pens you have will inevitably be lent out to students. They often labour under the misconception that they hate writing because their hand hurts - but switch pens and you have happier students.
There are benefits to a ballpoint - mainly how cheap it is, and its easy storing ability. But for goodness sake, don’t let them chew it! Exploding pens are a real pain, and ballpoints are chiefly to blame for this phenomenon.
SCORE: 3/10. Cheap, but problematic.
3. Technical pens
A relatively new entrant to the pen competition, the technical pen provides a kind of half-way house between ballpoint and fountain. It glides onto the paper in a similar fashion to the fountain pen, but its nib is far sturdier and less likely to smudge.
The main issue comes when you make the mistake of lending them out. When a person writes with a technical pen, their own particular peculiarities in their script are “learnt” by the pen. The pressure and angle that you lean at is taken on by the pen. When you then lend the pen to someone else, it can be returned with the other writer’s peculiarities irreversibly stamped on it. Like lending out a woolly jumper to someone two sizes larger than you are, it comes back saggy and gaping: you try to write with the pen again, but it’s all wrong. They’ve ruined it.
SCORE: 7/10. Too risky. Only good if you don’t share.
So, which is the best pen? A combination of all of them. Get to the pen aisle and stock up. You’ll need them.
Grainne Hallahan has been teaching English in Essex for 10 years. She is part of the #TeamEnglish Twitter group
