I wrote out a long answer and thought I posted to this yesterday and I wonder where in the æther it went off to.
In short, while I don’t know the answer, I gave three guesses.
One off-the-wall one is that it’s harder to hold one’s head up straight and concentrate on a fixed point in front of one’s eyes than it is to look down and do so. We learn to read and write with the paper on a surface, after all.
The other guesses had to do with font and contrast. Most printers are still far more pixel dense than even high-resolution screens so the individual characters are sharper and blacker. Black on white is good high contrast for reading, and the glare of a white screen is far more distracting than the cool white surface of paper.
And I thank you very much for the compliment.
I do a lot of editing and I’m better on hardcopy. But if I have to share my edits I prefer electronic edits.
It also depends on the type of editing - If I’m writing new or revised text I prefer electronic. If I have to do a ton of word replacements or re-writing sentences it’s easier to do it on paper.
But I always do a final edit on paper before I give it to our proofreader.
One thing I’ve learned - if you are doing comments on a document from a number of people nothing beats having the document with each person’s comments/suggested text color coded up on a large screen. You can then do a “group edit” to get final text. It’s an excruciating process but no one can say their comments were ignored by the editing process. And everyone has a much better buy-in on the final product.
Whistlepig