This week it was reported that students could soon be sitting their end-of-year exams on laptops after pupils complained of hand fatigue, saying their muscles “are not strong enough”.

With Ofqual preparing to launch a public consultation on the introduction of onscreen exams, we decided to conduct a test of our own, pitting the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, a seasoned hack of the pen-and-paper generation, against George Francis Lee, our gen-Z journalist in training.

Armed with only a pad, pen and a media law textbook to copy from – we set out to discover who could scribble the longest before cramp set in. It’s a write-off!

Zoe Williams, Guardian columnist

I take enormous pride in my ability to use a pen and paper. Though perhaps it’s the most absurd thing to show off about, like flexing that you know how to desalinate sea water using only two spoons, when you have fresh running water throughout the house.

I’ve been pretending to “have” shorthand – it is so dumb, I even like the slightly archaic “have” rather than the less affected “can do” – for so long I can’t even remember whether it was a boast when I started lying about it. Maybe in the 90s everyone could do shorthand, the way everyone could remember their landline number. In fact, I never learned it; what I learned instead is how to write very fast, forever, in the most adverse settings.

This write-off, in its climate-controlled conditions – a desk, a pen that worked, good light, a spotless notepad – should have been a personal best. I’ve knelt on wet municipal paving bricks outside magistrates courts, I’ve written a quote on my own hand. One time I was interviewing at an Australian speed-dating night in Alexandra Palace, ran out of paper, ripped some from the hands of a guy who’d just finished snogging and as I walked off, he said “but that had her phone number … ” Only I can ever decipher what I’ve written, which is fine, because only I need to. In that sense, it’s a lot like shorthand.

Zoe Williams: ‘It holds so much meaning for me, this writing with a pen.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

It holds so much meaning for me, this writing with a pen, and I’ve been doing it so long, that naturally I am incredibly fast and good at it, except it turns out I’m not. I’m no faster than George, from the “what’s this thing? Which end do you use?” generation; I’m just much more flamboyant and triumphant when I turn the page.

It’s true that I don’t get hand strain, or any of the other shooting pains that digital natives complain of, but that could equally be because all the associations I have with fast handwriting are very adrenalised: sitting exams; writing emotional letters; taking notes in my resistance-movement meetings in order to memorise then eat them. Maybe the pain happened afterwards, and I didn’t notice because my elbow hurts anyway.

Longhand differs from a recording device, not in accuracy but in the intercession of this quaint little thing called “your brain”. It can pick out immediately the interesting and unusual thing in a sea of ums and ahs and cliches. It will hear the words that make that person unlike any other person (unless they’re a politician, they don’t really do idiosyncrasy). As disappointed as I am, that I’ve pinned my identity to handwriting only to be the same as a gen Z except messier, I will not stop doing it.

Francis Lee and Williams, eyes down. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

George Francis Lee, Guardian trainee

The ballpoint pen feels spindly in my hand and the blank, lined paper in front of me conjures up the primal fear of GCSEs. I swallow hard. It’s the irrational “my entire life hinges on whatever falls upon the A4 sheet” sort of dread that you don’t expect to be subjected to on a random weekday afternoon.

I’m being tested on my handwriting – to see how much I can write and how long for. Just pen and paper, old-school style – no big deal. But this feels different from pitting my wits against an exam paper. I’ve been tasked with taking on a seasoned industry hack with more experience of note-taking than I do of breathing. Me, a spritely gen-Z journalist in the making, versus Guardian legend and scribbler-in-chief, Zoe Williams.

With the news that students in the near future may sit certain GCSE and A-level exams on a laptop because young people are losing the ability to write for long periods, a generational scribing match has been arranged to test our mettle and our hand muscles.

Speaking of hands, we shake ours before starting a 10-minute timer. I zoom into the preface of the 27th edition of McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists and begin. Seconds pass and I can’t help but see my opponent scrawling in long, bending roulettes. She moves with the speed of a 10th-century scrivener, in a script that looks as unfamiliar as Beowulf. Then I look to my page, words still on the first line, tightly formed letters distributed equally for maximum legibility.

George Francis Lee: ‘She moves with the speed of a 10th-century scrivener.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

I hear a page turn. Somehow, I’m barely a few sentences in and my foe is on a clean sheet. I shift into gear, legibility be damned. I write with reckless abandon, spilling across lines. It’s probably three minutes before my hand starts to ache, not much later until it starts to properly cramp – right at that fleshy bit at the base of the thumb.

Another page turns. I curse McNae’s, I curse not journaling more, I curse the invention of the notes app on my iPhone. I curse it all. But I push on, though not without a meek admission that my hand, indeed, hurts.

The timer finally rings, and I drop the pen like it’s hot iron. I’m surprised to find that, by the end, I’d nearly caught Zoe. Still, I have lost – the competition but not the respect of my adversary, who is magnanimous in victory. Perhaps we should arrange a rematch on a smartphone, I think – or maybe I should have squeezed a bit harder during that handshake.