My habit for college essays was to write scratch notes on paper, with lots of bullet points, and arrows for re-arranging text, to get the outline of the essay in place, but to actually put the real words together on the computer.

I remember my mother once doing the opposite: she wrote a long letter on the computer, so she could edit and re-write until she was happy with it, then printed it out and copied it by hand, for the personal touch of a hand-written letter (a peacemaking letter to a relative).