3 ms·

Are We Different Writers When We Move from Longhand to a Screen?

1 points by fern12 9y ago

Nomentatus 9y ago
My take is different. Long before PCs came around, I had been typing everything since I was a kid, not writing longhand. (Henpecking until high school, touch typing after that.) Getting on a word processor changed everything about my writing, both for good and bad. The good part was that I found that my previous typewritten style was actually quite cramped. Since erasing was quite difficult on a typewriter (and quite expensive) I had a strong habits that kept me from "typing myself into a corner." That is, typing the first half of a sentence and then finding that there was no grammatically correct way of finishing the sentence. So I stuck to a limited number of sentence forms and didn't experiment much. On the WP, on a PC, I could just blather. This loosened me up and made me much more flexible and experimental as a writer, greatly diversifying my use of grammatical forms - but I was nothing like as concise as I had been, before. For a while I switched back and forth trying to figure out which technology gave the best result. Eventually I concluded that it was the exercise of switching back and forth gave the best result; it was very educational. After some switches back and forth, I felt I could thereafter just stick with the wordprocessor without losing much concision. Just to explain a bit further - I typed for many years before whiteout (paint) existed. Back then, typing over (blacking out) your mistakes resulted in really ugly documents. So you really had to get it right the first time if you could, and then retype the whole thing if you made too many errors. Even after whiteout appeared, errors were still somewhat visible and more importantly: for many years the whiteout paint was very expensive, especially for a kid. The incentive to stick to simple, stereotyped grammar at all times was quite strong. FWIW, I and one other guy were the first males in our entire province to ever take typing classes as high school students. We explained that we wanted to work on computers when we grew up, which struck adults as quite mad - there were only dozens of computers in the country, so why on God's earth would we think that we'd win the lottery and end up working on one?

1 points by fern12 9y ago

My take is different. Long before PCs came around, I had been typing everything since I was a kid, not writing longhand. (Henpecking until high school, touch typing after that.) Getting on a word processor changed everything about my writing, both for good and bad. The good part was that I found that my previous typewritten style was actually quite cramped. Since erasing was quite difficult on a typewriter (and quite expensive) I had a strong habits that kept me from "typing myself into a corner." That is, typing the first half of a sentence and then finding that there was no grammatically correct way of finishing the sentence. So I stuck to a limited number of sentence forms and didn't experiment much. On the WP, on a PC, I could just blather. This loosened me up and made me much more flexible and experimental as a writer, greatly diversifying my use of grammatical forms - but I was nothing like as concise as I had been, before. For a while I switched back and forth trying to figure out which technology gave the best result. Eventually I concluded that it was the exercise of switching back and forth gave the best result; it was very educational. After some switches back and forth, I felt I could thereafter just stick with the wordprocessor without losing much concision. Just to explain a bit further - I typed for many years before whiteout (paint) existed. Back then, typing over (blacking out) your mistakes resulted in really ugly documents. So you really had to get it right the first time if you could, and then retype the whole thing if you made too many errors. Even after whiteout appeared, errors were still somewhat visible and more importantly: for many years the whiteout paint was very expensive, especially for a kid. The incentive to stick to simple, stereotyped grammar at all times was quite strong. FWIW, I and one other guy were the first males in our entire province to ever take typing classes as high school students. We explained that we wanted to work on computers when we grew up, which struck adults as quite mad - there were only dozens of computers in the country, so why on God's earth would we think that we'd win the lottery and end up working on one?