The BBC offers a pleasant bit of retrophilia. (Thanks for the link, Robert.)

Mrs Huggins tried using a computer about 15 years ago and the memory is still raw. "I had four pages of instructions I had to learn, to send [my previous employers] the stories. Then the blooming thing blew up and they told me that it was my fault, and it wasn't, it just burnt out."

She says she can produce her stories at least as quickly as her rivals, because the risk of technical failure is virtually nil - she keeps a spare typewriter at hand - and because the typewriter encourages her to get the story right first time.

This may sound like an impossibly Spartan ideal, where cut and paste is done with scissors and glue, and deleted words remain on the page as angry little blobs. But for some left jaded and distracted by their smarty-pants computers, it is tempting.

The writer Will Self is a convert. He went back to using a manual typewriter several years ago. "I think the computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled, because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more thinking in the head," he said in a recent interview.

Great little tool from bookrags. Use a drop-down list to construct your own sonnet, using lines from Shakespeare's corpus. This might be a good tool to ease students into constructing their own sonnets.

Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up

(start a new sonnet)

If your father is an English professor, how do you respond to poorly written signs in a kiddie park?

Everywhere I go, I like taking pictures of signs with mistakes that make good classroom proofreading examples.

Shortly after I moved to Western Pennsylvania, I learned that Idlewild Park is the regional version of Disneyland.  Every year we get season passes, and a regular stop for us is Storybook Forest -- which my wife remembers visiting when she was a little girl. 

Who knows how many generations of children have seen this sign and wondered about the anonymous dwarven sign-maker who claims ownership over the familiar seven?

This article from eSchoolNews does a good job emphasizing some of the relevant lessons from a recent Pew report:

For most media outlets that reported on an important new survey measuring the impact of technology on teens' writing skills, the big news from the survey was that emoticons and text-messaging abbreviations are creeping into students' formal writing assignments. :-(

Buried beneath the alarm of writing "purists," however, was a promising finding with equally important implications for schools: Blogging is helping many teens become more prolific writers.

The idea of paying for positive coverage at a scholarly conference is 0% original.

Inside Higher Ed reports on Turnitin.com's awkward efforts to get positive coverage at the 4Cs next year.  (Via KairosNews, which links to blogger reactions.)

The issue of paying professors to attend the 4C's meeting is particularly sensitive because of the make-up of the association. Many of the people most knowledgeable about teaching composition are adjunct professors or full timers who are off the tenure track and who frequently don't have the same access as tenured professors to travel budgets and research support. As a result, there is arguably more discussion within the 4C's meeting than at some others about issues related to who can afford to attend and present. The conference has a fund to help those without travel budgets attend the meeting -- but applications for such support are not based on whether or not someone favors using Turnitin.com. Kent Williamson, executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, of which the 4C's is part, said he had never before heard of a company offering to pay people whose papers on selected topics are accepted for the annual meeting. He stressed that Turnitin.com did not ask permission to involve itself with the conference in this way and that the payments it makes are "not in any way a 4C's initiative."

I do use Turnitin.com. I can only think of one time when the service identified problems with a paper submitted by a student who wasn't already showing serious signs of trouble in other areas (such as excessive absences or not turning in the pre-writing).  I've even had a false positive where a student who had posted her pre-writing on her blog was surprised to find Turnitin.com calling the resulting paper "unoriginal" when it found her blog and compared its contents against the submitted work. Of course I explained to the student I would never even think of taking action on a Turnitin.com report without first investigating thoroughly, but that student was still distressed.

More cruel jokes to play on literal-minded people.