Revising in the age of backspace

While writing this essay, I took notes from Moran’s article, went back to some material that I wrote for a class last semester, and looked up another essay that Moran had mentioned using the online archive JSTOR. I wrote down chunks of thoughts and, at the end of the process, strung them all together with a little revision and some globs of transition. Because I didn’t write this all in one sitting, I stumbled across some information on a couple of weblogs that I read which pertained to this essay’s topic and threw them in with everything else. To accomplish all of this without the aid of my laptop and an internet connection would have required a trip or two to IUPUI’s library, and some days of waiting while information was ordered from other libraries. I would have had to cart around a pad of paper with a pen. Oh, and I would have had to order transcripts from a National Public Radio interview and talk to an individual (the blogger) about his conversation with the poet laureate Donald Hall.

There is no question that technology offers teachers availability to more applications of good, age-old principles. But are there also some drawbacks to a high-tech classroom that need to be considered and, if possible, mitigated? There are the obvious questions of equality when it comes to access to technology, and plagiarism, and different comfort levels … but does technology enable students to become better writers, does it help teachers help students to be better writers?

Does technology make us less responsive, more pro-active, both positively and negatively, to students and the immediate and unique context of each classroom?

Does technology make us poorer revisers because we don’t have to re-write the whole thing all over again? We can hunt and peck and pick and choose our changes, which then tend to be more grammatical than thematic?

On the weblog “Working With Words,” blogger John Ettorre notes that writer James Salter said, “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” Technology needs to be discussed in the classroom not only in the context of aids to learning, but in the very real context in which the students live, work, think, and experience life. The sped-up news cycle, the instant access of cellular contact, the constant availability of information even as the population’s trust in traditional information sources erodes: these are the issues that can be discussed, assimilated, or combated through the intentional, considered saving of thought—writing, in other words, by whatever means necessary.

“People always ask how much of your time is spent researching and how much of your time is spent on writing? But nobody ever asks me how much time I spend thinking. And writing is thinking,” historian David McCullough told NPR's Diane Rehm. He was explaining he never apologizes for using a manual Royal typewriter, which he bought second-hand in 1965, and which he called “a magnificent piece of American machinery, built in 1940.”

In 1964, John Lord described good writing as “a constant weaving up and down—between the concrete and the abstract, as well as a constant forward movement from a beginning through a middle to an end.” Writing on-screen provides the writer with the ability to quickly move back and forth, even move sections of text back and forth, to not only produce text that is both concrete and abstract, but to think and write both concretely and abstractly.

In “The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens,” Stephen A. Bernardt describes the modular, hierarchical nature of onscreen text: “It borrows heavily on the evolved strategies readers possess for interacting with printed texts, but provides a more fluid, changeable medium, so that the text itself becomes an object for manipulation and change” (173).

Still, the mind moves more quickly than the hand. How will writing change when writers no longer need to type, but simply speak? The final degree of this shift seems impossibly challenging to writing: when the thoughts of a writer are transferred directly from his mind to a medium in which they can be maneuvered. Pre-writing could become obsolete and writing might become a process of extensive revision, hacking through the reams of thoughts. My roommate in college had an early version of dictation software—his parents spent a lot of money on it, no doubt visualizing him pacing his dorm room late at night, hands clasped behind his back, academia tumbling from his lips. The reality was wonderfully profane. He was never able to accurately calibrate the software to his voice and the results looked like a translation from Korean to Zulu to English with a lot of four-letter words included (presumably the software’s frustrated additions). My roommate also struggled with revising his work: because he had to go back and fix so many grammatical errors he rarely had enough time to address the thematic issues of his essays.

I was able to attend a discussion by Sydney Pollack about his screenwriting, in which he said that “All writing is rewriting,” meaning that one is always editing and reforming the story that occurs first in one’s mind. Donald Hall, the last poet laureate, advised writers to “Revise endlessly. Never show a poem to anybody else until you have worked on it yourself for a couple of months...or a couple of years. Depending on how long it takes.”

While Moran touched on a number of good points, he also creates problems for himself by approaching current (1998) technology as though it would be static for some time to come. His lingo—on-line writing instead of onscreen writing—would have been dated when he wrote the article, and some of his opinions are frankly objectionable. I would not like to run his idea that men are “hard coders” while women are “soft coders” past the women in my IT department. I don’t think I would make it back to my cubicle alive. Teachers need to be very careful not to approach current technology as fixed and they need to be even more careful about appearing to have “mastered” technology. Chances are that at least one student in every classroom will know more about technology than the teacher, and most students will be more comfortable with the social aspects of technology. What teachers should do is foster an environment in which students are able to contribute to a general pool of knowledge about technology which the teacher can then use in applying good writing principles.

Literary critic and historian Walter Ong noted that writing is, in a sense, a technology; that pens and paper, or keyboards and hard drives, are parts of machines which allow the user to save thoughts, to leave an imprint for future use, and to exist in more than one place at the same time. Ong suggests that because the writer’s audience is further away, in time or space or both, “A surface inscribed with information can neutralize time by preserving the information and conquer space by moving the information to its recipient over distances that sound cannot traverse.” It is a fascinating idea that writing allows us to be in more than one place at one time—that our actual thoughts may outlast us and may be easier for future generations to discern than our other social contributions. Ong’s insistence that writing is a technology which promotes a “delta effect” of ideas certainly prefigures today’s media-driven world in which the themes of history multiply endlessly for each niche group, and the blogosphere provides instant contact with the world.

But technology does provide more interconnectedness—which can be good for communally aware pedagogies like feminism, cultural studies, and critical teaching. I stumbled across the interview with Donald Hall when I did a Google search for the David McCullough interview. Completely serendipitous and at odd angles to where I originally saw this short essay headed. Could this be a metaphor for a classroom? The Buddhist believes, or so Dan Brown tells me, that all of us know everything already and learning is simply a process of remembering what we had forgotten we knew. How can a teacher Google a class?

It would be a good idea for teachers to reinforce with students the idea that writing is thinking—it is not filling a page with scribbles or a screen with symbols. Barbara Couture notes that “We pay a price…by reducing those acts that make us uniquely human—speaking and writing—to a device or technology to be mastered, ignoring their more central role in shaping the way we are and live.” When I write about the difference between page and screen and the difficulty in describing how marks are made on (or in or at) a screen, I’m reminded of the Saturday Night Live “Celebrity Jeopardy” skit in which host Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek implores the contestants to “write anything and you win…please, I’m begging you, just put a mark on the screen…”

And one comes across the most amusing things with the aid of technology. After reading the Donald Hall interview I checked Wikipedia to find out who the present PLOTUS is (it’s now Kay Ryan), and discovered a short history of poets laureaute. Apparently, the salary has varied, but traditionally includes some alcohol. Ben Jonson first received a pension of 100 marks, and later an annual "terse of Canary wine." Dryden had a pension of £300 and a butt of Canary wine. Could I have developed something that amusing by myself? Does technology dull us?

So, my essay today is scattershot, mostly on purpose, as I have intentionally distracted myself with the technological attractions at my fingertips. But now my dog is distracting me.

There are some worthwhile thoughts on public vs. private in blogging (and a nod to Douglas Adams) at http://byzantium.wordpress.com/please-read-this-first/.