Why typewriters beat computers
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.
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This article was funny, but i soooooo totally disagree with the last paragraph. So much easier to write a story with a computer than a typewriter. My computer doesn't do my thinking for me. I do my thinking for me :-) The computer makes it easier to cut, paste, delete, back-space, etc...you can't do that with a typewriter. Yet, I get the point that he makes at the end...but I still disagree.
For longer documents, I still print out drafts and mark them up, because that's the workflow that I used when I was first learning to master my craft. But I still see students who refuse to learn how to center a heading, or how to automate page numbers -- they still enter spaces and blank lines manually, which means they resist making little changes in the body of the paper because they'll have to go through the tedious routine of re-adjusting all the manual spacing. It would take 5 seconds to learn how to do it automatically, but they'd rather spend much more time doing things their own way.
No cub reporter in the 21st century is going to get away with the strategies these typewriting purists love.
However, I do remember one day when I was interning at a local news radio station, when the power went out everywhere except for the main brodcast booth. We were still on the air, but the computers were all down, which meant the printers were down, which meant that the normal workflow process -- get news from the wire feeds, type it up in a special word processor, print it out and put it on a specific table along with audio tapes -- was completely disurpted. I showed up with a recent copy of the college paper in my hands, and the news staff pointed me to an old manual typewriter and begged me to give them some fresh news. I was glad, then, that I had learned to touch-type on a manual typewriter, because suddenly that was the only tool I could use.