Opinion, Point vs. Counterpoint

PCP for wooden pencils

Wooden pencils to me are like the sturdy phones of the twentieth century that no one seems to use anymore. However, I’m going to defend them in this PCP and explain how they’re not a really old bulky antenna phone, but perhaps a flip phone that may still have some uses in today’s society.
Wooden pencils, first of all, are more sturdy and rigid in terms of graphite. Back when I was in elementary school, I would sit at the table with my classmates and watch a few students use the mechanical pencils. Back then, our hands were much less dextrous and we could barely colour inside the lines. We were rougher with our hands, and wooden pencil’s graphite could take it. I would frequently observe my classmates continuously breaking their lead because they were pushing too hard. Since we could barely handle crayons, introducing mechanical pencils to a young child seemed like a bad idea from the start. Speaking of graphite, the wooden pencil generally has a wide cylinder of material inside the pencil, whereas the mechanical pencil has around 0.5-0.7mm standard. This allows you to have more control over the pencil by sharpening it to the sharpness you wanted; different pencils require difference lead widths for the mechanical variety. Not only that, but I’m sure you all remember trying to sharpen your wood pencils extremely carefully so that the pencil shavings would stay as one strand, which you could then show off to your friends. You can’t get that same quality of entertainment from mechanical pencils.
The protrusion of graphite from the pencil also matters quite a bit for artists. Angling wooden pencils on the side allows for different tones and widths of strokes, adding variety to your masterpieces. This isn’t possible with mechanical pencils, which is why some artists may use both types instead of only one. This allows for more efficient blending of the shades in your drawings, and less rough lines created by mechanical pencils. You could also have various wood pencils with varying thicknesses, just like the mechanicals do, in order to satisfy a wider ranges of tones and lines for your drawings. Bulk mechanical pencils are more expensive, and thus wooden pencils can be purchased on the cheap to get more pencils, obtaining a wide range of tones, as well as owning many extras. Some mechanical pencils have plastics in them too, whereas wood ones would be safe for the environment if recycled properly, so they’re the green choice too.
As mentioned briefly above, you require different graphite widths for mechanical pencils, which gets annoying when you have to replace them either through the top or the bottom. If you’re not dextrous, this can prove to be challenging. Even worse, it seems like you always run out of graphite during an evaluation, and the nerves cause you to start rushing to replace it, but they might actually hinder your progress due to your shaky hands. For wooden pencils, you would only have to sharpen your pencils, and using the sharpeners which have the built in shaving-catchers, it makes your life easy with quick disposal. Speaking of finals, I’m the kind of person that does not like when people make unnecessary noise during exams. Wooden pencils do not squeak, whereas some mechanical ones do when you press the button to extrude more graphite. I’ll admit this is a minor case, but any distraction during a final is a bad one.
Another surprising use for wooden pencils would be for spinning on your hands. This task is incredibly difficult, and with a more balanced writing utensil, you can do more impressive tricks due to the structure. Wooden pencils are already fairly uniform, but mechanical pencils sometimes come with that little plastic hook thing on the side. To make it balanced, you’d have to modify the pen, but this can simply be bypassed by owning a wooden pencil and learning the tricks directly on it.
As a final disclaimer, I dislike the erasers on both types of pencils. I highly recommend using external rubbers to fix any mistakes you’ve made (I’m partial to Muji). Besides, all pencils are inferior to pens anyway, but let’s save that for another PCP.

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