Does a computer give your drafts "too smooth a gloss"?

In November, following the publication of his presidential memoir, it emerged that Barack Obama wrote the entire 760-page tome by hand, on yellow legal notepaper with a pen. A pen!?

"I still like writing things out in longhand, finding that a computer gives even my roughest drafts too smooth a gloss and lends half-baked thoughts the mask of tidiness,” he wrote in A Promised Land.

I'm reminded of a piece by Alexander Chee that makes a similar point, showing the way that word processing software has evolved over time to make drafts look more and more complete.

He also mentions the final, finalFINAL, finalFINAL2 in too many filenames.

Chee's essay now appears to only be available to Medium members.

Yet recently, I spent time laying out my previous newsletter essays in InDesign, trying to see how they would look as a book. I wanted to give them that "final gloss," even though they weren't final, so that I could evaluate them in the way that their eventual reader might.