I don't get any cramping, but my computer use has definitely affected my penmanship.

I used to journal in longhand, and I used to write letters to friends and relatives in longhand. I always prided myself on having pretty penmanship.

Now my handwriting is mostly limited to grocery lists and post-it notes and it feels stilted and looks messy. It makes me sad.

It doesn't take me the full length of a letter to get all cramped up. I just wrote a short note on a post-it, which was practically illegible. I also find that my muscle memory and brain are out of sync when trying to write by hand. I misspell and transpose letters MUCH more than I ever did when I wrote more than I typed.

I have to write by hand for my job, so my muscles still feel pretty good. Legibility, not so much, however.

I had my first day of classes, I was stretching my fingers out after every third sentence in one class. I didn't bring my laptop since, shoot, who does a full class on the first day when no one even has the book yet?
Answer: my CS professor, apparently.

Oh, and the book: almost $70 at the campus bookstore. Less than $20 online. I'll be getting it online. I may not have it as fast, but damn, a $50 difference?! That's two weeks groceries!

Kelly, when I was in grad school, my department stopped even bothering to tell the campus bookstore what books to order since all the students bought from Amazon anyway. Even if you pay for fast shipping, it's faster than the school book store.

You can apparently rent textbooks now, too.

You want to talk about what the computer's doing to me? Fucking computer's brutalizing my ability to read more than a handful of pages without needing to take a break every so often.

Grrr.

Oops, I mean "cheaper than the school book store".

As for hand cramps, I have bad memories of my undergrad years before word processors and writing everything out in my left-handed scratch and getting horrible cramps. Even with typewriters you usually wrote it out long hand first since you couldn't correct easily.