From pictograms to pixel fonts, written language has evolved over time, changing in response to communication methods and printing technology. This overview is presented as an introduction to the origins, evolution, and applications of modern letterforms. —The Evolution of Type (Medium Bold)
The ubiquity of the word processor has changed what it means to write. I still hear professors talk about “note cards,” which were part of the writing process taught to me when I was in high school. The idea, of course, was that you could rearrange your note cards during the early drafting process, so that you would have some idea of the organization of your ideas before you actually started writing. For those of you born in the last 25 or so years, yes indeed, we actually wrote our papers out by hand, and then when we revised them we had to write them over again. We had a motivation to cut deadwood, since we could get the draft finished faster if we didn’t copy that whole wordy opening paragraph and instead just copied the one sentence that actually introduced the subject we were really going to write about.
I’m not advocating that students should go back to the process of hand-writing their papers; instead, I’m simply noting that today’s most experienced teachers learned to write in a very different way. I started word-processing some of my school assignments in middle school, around 1980 (although some of my teachers were refusing dot-matrix printouts). I have a great, satisfying sensory memory of picking up a stack of fan-folded paper, tearing off the rows of holes on the outer edges, and then separating the pages. I never bothered to tear apart all those perforations unless the printout was intended for someone else to read, and to this day I associate tearing perforated paper with that “job well done” feeling. When I was an undergrad at U.Va., for major assignments I would walk my disk to the laser printers in the computer lab (my favorite was a few steps from Cabell Hall at the other end of the Central Grounds from the Rotunda).
Since it is now push-button easy to get high-quality copies of drafts that are in progress, I wonder how much that affects the ability of today’s students to recognize when they have put sufficient work into a paper. In medieval times, if you wanted about 20 pages to write on, you had to kill a sheep, skin it, and tan the hide (I recall the process has something to do with urine). So all writing that was produced was precious. That’s taking it a bit too far, of course — to make a mistake was costly, in terms of both time and resources, which undoubtedly affected the activities of a scribe (whose main job was to copy faithfully and accurately the words that somebody else had composed).
Eric, that’s a funny story about notecards. I’ve had college students whose approach to academic research isn’t too far different. There’s still the assumption that the right answer is in a book somewhere, and that the purpose of a research assignment is to find the “right” answer (which the professor has presumably found in a book). One of my challenges is to introduce students to the whole process of discovering/creating/formulating the knowledge that goes into the textbooks. My teaching assistant for freshman comp, Michelle, is a senior history major who has been working on a 30-page paper all term… the freshmen were both fascinated and terrified by the progress she made. And I enjoyed the expression on their face when I tell them that my book went through 18 drafts after it was accepted for publication. (The changes were copy-editing changes, or things like adding the index; there was little substantive editing, but it was still amazing how much detail went into getting that book ready for the printers.)
Considering my lousy typing skills, I suspect I’d never be able to write anything of any length if I had to deal with carbon paper and correction fluid. Plus, I’d be too quick to figure a sentence or paragraph was “good enough” when correcting would mean retyping a whole page. Who am I kidding? I WAS too quick…I lived through those hellish pre-word processor days. I survived the typewriter. Still haven’t run across a computer substitute for note cards. Not freeware at least. The first time I used notecards for a research project, in fourth grade, I operated under the assumption that the idea was to find a library book, transfer the entire contents to cards, take the cards home, and transfer the contents back to paper.
Yes, procrastination is nothing new. And while the computer CAN be used to assign more meaningful activities, that doesn’t mean that the tool is used to its best advangate. (SHU is on an “information literacy” kick this year, designed to get more faculty interested in the subject… so far in the handful of talks and demonstrations on that subject, I haven’t seen that term defined or applied with much consistency). Regarding the nature of media change in education, I think a certain media fatigue that sets in. Students who are used to MTV or, let’s say, a documentary on The History Channel, may get bored in a traditional lecture more quickly than students did a generation ago (when a color slide might have been a rarity). And yes, my old textbooks are filled with doodles. I recall I went through a phase in high school where I had to insert the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion in the background of any picture that showed sky. (This was back when Russia was the evil empire.) In this age of multitasking, you can get a lot of meaningless stuff accomplished (checking your e-mail and weeding out spams, posting something to your blog, etc.) instead of daydreaming. Whoops, someone’s calling me from upstairs… GTG.
It’s interesting to hear about “how things used to be”.
It sounds like perhaps the computer allows english teachers to assign more meaningful assignments nowadays.
I have absolutely no doubt you’ve seen good students fiddling with Word, or playing solitaire when they instead of rereading the text. But procrastination is hardly a new phenomenon :-) – remember the days of people doodling in the margins, or passing notes, or simply day dreaming? Personally, I don’t think that the computer has increased the amount of time spent procrastinating – it just used to be done differently.
Yes, typing the final manuscript was a pain. My freshman year I sometimes typed papers for fraternity-boy types (I made sure to preserve all their spelling and grammar errors) for spending money; once I got a free tux rental in swap.
Certainly the computer makes *revision* easier — you no longer have to re-type the whole page just to change a few lines. And then there is the old-fashioned version of “cut and paste” (with scissors and glue, or tape anway… then you’d photocopy the result).
Of course, English students aren’t doing the exact same work as they were assigned in the 60s (not that I was around then). I remember in middle school and high school getting assignments that asked me to go to the library and find what three or five authors said about subject X. Now, search engines can get you those results in 10 seconds (both Google and the library databases that search academic journals), so those assignments are pretty much pointless today.
There’s a whole academic field on “composition theory,” which studies the way that people put their ideas together. (See a blog entry by Mike Arnzen.) And the scholarship I’ve read on that subject agrees that revision is easier with a computer. I don’t mean to say that old-fashioned composition is better; it’s just that today’s most experienced teachers learned to write according to a certain pattern, and the way today’s students write is very different from that pattern. I find I have to create a lot more checkpoints and opportunities for feedback than I remember my instructors giving me. Maybe once in a while my teachers would offer to read a rough draft if we turned it in a week early, and some of the grad students would permit revisions; but for the most part my teachers simply said “a 10 page paper is due on this date,” I would turn it in, and I would get it back with a letter grade and maybe a few factual errors or egregious typos circled; really no helpful comments for how to do better next time, or praise for what I did right.
I have seen plenty of good students spend far too much time fiddling with MS-Word’s thesaurus, or fiddling with spacing and fonts, when they should be dealing with huge problems in thought, or maybe (gasp) re-reading (or simply *reading*) the literary texts they’re supposed to be writing about. I recall reading somewhere that good writers who use grammar-checkers actually end up submitting papers with more mistakes than if they didn’t use grammer-checkers. So, Will, while the comptuer does free us from certain drudgery, it also opens up distractions (such as comptuer games or IM windows, which can easily fritter away as much time as it used to take to type out a fresh copy).
For those who are only in it for the grade, it won’t matter. But for people who do take an interest in their writing, I would think that the substatially descreased time that’s spent by the writer manipulating the physical would have a tremendous positive effect on the amount of time they could spend on their work! Seriously, if english students today did the exact same work they did in in the 1960’s, it would take significantly less time because of the computer (My parents went to school back then – you had to type your paper on the typewriter before turning it in – I can’t imagine it was a quick process). I would also think that this “push-button easy” would make it easier for readers or a professor to judge a work on it’s writing, rather than “this paper looks cheap”.
On another note, if you want to study what “push-button easy” does to writing, perhaps you should study to writing quality of these things called “weblogs”. :-)