Does your iPad hurt your writing, or help it?

Your typing fingers must hover above the iPad, as if you were a big brother preparing to tickle a sibling into submission, and therefore it’s impossible to touch-type.

You smudge up the screen as you use it, reminding you just how grubby human skin really is.

On the other hand, the iPad is portable and makes it easy to jot down your thoughts. And it is possible to get a detachable keyboard.

So is your iPad ruining your writing? Or is it a great new tool for those of us in the business of shoveling copy?

One wordsmith insists the iPad is a bad way to write, so we at Ragan.com decided to elbow our way into the debate. We queried iPad-using writers we know and conjured a host of literary spirits with the help of Dan Gerstein at Gotham Ghostwriters.

The question of whether the iPad ruins your writing surfaced recently on The Hired Guns blog, where Daryl Lang contends that the device isn’t much help when it comes to getting words on the page. It was designed for consuming media, not creating it, he says.