In Andrew Robinson’s “Writing Systems”, he suggests that it does not seem likely that writing evolved from the counting system of clay ‘tokens’ (which served as an extension of human memory already in the late 4^th millennium BC) – despite of the fact that many hold the belief that writing grew out of the counting system; rather, the emergence of writing was accompanied by the ‘tokens [1]. 

Jerry Eugene Pournelle’s cost-benefit analysis of writing, as recorded by Kirschenbaum in the first history of word processing, not only evokes the primeval conditions that give rise to writing but also suggests the new definition of writing in a digital age [2]. To Pournelle writing equals to, in his own words, “the business of making a living” [2]. What his motto “writing is hard work” reflects is not the divinity of the writing process but “the actual labor of being an author”, the idea that “anyone can learn to do it” and the idea that one’s writing is one’s work.

Even though modern technologies, such as microcomputer or the word processor, free human beings from the tedious aspect of editing and rewriting, the real relationship between writing and society still does not change that much; it is only the awareness of the divine (but not necessarily religious) origin of writing is lost. To twist a bit what William Blake wrote to his reader in the preface to the first chapter of his longest illuminated book Jerusalem, “[Human civilizations] are destroy’d or flourish, in proportion as their Poetry, Painting, and Music are destroy’d or flourish. The Primeval State of Man was Wisdom, Art, and Science” [3]. 

Reference

[1]       M. F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, Eds., The book: a global history, First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
[2]       M. G. Kirschenbaum, Track changes: a literary history of word processing. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
[3]       “To the Public. Selections from ‘Jerusalem’. William Blake. 1908. The Poetical Works.” [Online]. Available: https://www.bartleby.com/235/304.html. [Accessed: 25-Feb-2020].

Since I first began writing during the computer age, I don’t have a felt sense of the difference in composing work on a typewriter. However, I do remember learning keyboarding in elementary school, and how liberating an experience writing and editing on a computer was. As a child, I struggled with spelling, and poor handwriting. I felt less judged handing in typed up papers that were identical looking to my classmates. Once my typing speed improved, I also experienced that typing could more quickly transfer my thought process on the page than handwriting (I never learned to adequately write in shorthand). On a computer, I could also transfer incongruous thoughts as they bubbled up and organize them later on. In this way, I relate to poet Kamau Brathewait’s statement, “The computer is getting as close as you can to the spoken word” (Kirschenbaum, 199). Typing quickly while in a creative, inspired mindset feels similar (although not as un-mediated an experience) to picking up a musical instrument and communicating some non-verbal feeling or affect. However, when writing more structured essays, word processing technology can create problems. 

Lately, I worry that  my writing is becoming increasingly fragmented as a result of overwriting individual sentences. I sometimes labor over individual words or sections so much (typing and re-typing), that I interrupt the flow of the piece as a whole. Maybe there’s some truth to the fear that word processing software encourages “overwriting” (a concern that, according to Kirschenbaum, was common in the early years of computer technology). The problem is compounded by the fact that writers today work on computers with numerous web connected applications and research tools at their fingertips. These can be helpful, but I’ve found sometimes these tools overwhelm me with data and with other writer’s voices. Automated text editors like Grammarly further complicate the process and increase one’s anxiety as a writer (i.e. There’s an objectively “correct”  way to write that’s and technologically vetted). 

To escape this data-overload, I often find myself printing out sections of a manuscript, organizing pages spatially, and even cutting up paragraphs and moving them around physically on the desk. Maybe I do this to regain some tactile feeling of my writing – so it’s not all in my computer/mind.

Using computers was pretty common and obvious when I was young, but I was in the transitional period that certain handwritten system also existed in Korea. It was writing on a given form, a ‘squared manuscript paper’. The most general type was for 200 characters with red lines. Each square can contain one letter, one mark, or one space. Elementary school essentially educated how to write on the squared manuscript paper in class, and official writing assignments and tests were to be written on it. At the same time, however, I was technically accessible to the word processor and knew how to use it. That is, I was a generation that was able to experience both forms of writing.

As with all handwritten system, writing on the squared manuscript paper has the tension of the uncorrectable. The difference is that it has the precise rules, even for which signs to use when making corrections (of course, in this case they are intuitive and universal, but still definite to follow). In this format, the actual writing had to begin very deliberately after careful consideration of the entire content of the writing. On the other hand, writing in a word processor made it more improvised and showed that the flow of thought can be cut and edited in a visible way.

Having many strict forms means it has authority. The ways to write on the squared manuscript paper were to be learned and trained. How well someone follows the format correctly, how well someone writes a complete composition with one stroke of a brush, or whether someone knows the rules when he/she has to modify it; these are a glimpse of the writer’s level of education. Indeed, writing on the squared manuscript paper was a symbol, especially of an intellectual. Despite the fact that word processing is now perfectly generalized, many contests of research or composition in Korea still announce the length limit of the writing based on the form of squared manuscript paper. Does the development in technology of writing equalize all of us and allow anyone to express their thoughts freely? A few years ago, I made and edited a book of stories that were created by long-time local residents, setting up the town they live as a stage of the stories, as part of activity against gentrification. The most enthusiastic, middle-aged male participant who had a dream of novelist but couldn’t realize it, and now run a small fried chicken restaurant, visited to give a handwritten composition on the squared manuscript paper when all other young participants e-mailed a word processor writing. Ashamed of the fact that he had never learned to use a computer, my team moved dozens of his handwritings to Word. Technological advances have made my writing fast, efficient, able to write anytime and revise whenever I want to, but is it really freeing everyone, including me? Are we perhaps isolating another invisible class in our writing technologies and composition process?

As we complete the first third of our journey exploring texts in context, text making technologies appear to dissolve the text into its context. Is context everything? Writing, printing, and word processing combine with the author as merely a vessel to point to unreal (and virtual) language as the answer to that perennial question: What is the there out there? While we chase our tails in epistemologies and the linguistic and literary turns culminate another spiral from the inward turn, how do we morally evaluate these seemingly emancipatory technologies during the irrevocable descent into the precipice of a climatic dead end, in which Mars in a dozen or so generations becomes the new Earth. Perhaps it would not be so apocalyptic to see the missing irony in Matthew Kirschenbaum’s colorful narrative, in Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, of the first novel written with a text processor. Was not Len Deighton’s Bomber written using the MT/ST a clear example emancipatory text technology in the service of the glorification of violent aerial technology? Perhaps humans never figured out the self-sustainable uses of technology, blaming technology as if language itself was the cause of hate speech.

While much else could be said about the writer’s love affair with text making technology, it is perhaps a truism that most if not all technologies have some combination of benefits and drawbacks, upside and downside. A successful outcome in the use of a given technology comes down perhaps to achieving a net positive effect of benefits over drawbacks. To the extent technology places more power in the hands of the tool user, successful use of software tools would seem to depend on additional computer skills and proficiencies.

As the main work horse for writing, word processing software has relieved me of a considerable degree of mental recall and mental organization of text (defined as meaningful language) required to order my thoughts into a final sequential form. Similar to Kirschenbaum’s accounts of many writers’ experience with computers, word processing for me has enabled language to flow in an almost raw state onto the virtual page; editing becomes a matter of cutting and pasting with the keyboard and a pointing device, essentially trivializing the inserting, deleting, and moving of any amount of text. Spelling and grammar checking tools reduce the time needed to achieve levels of quality and correctness. These features have freed me to focus more on smaller units of language such as the sentence, clauses, and phrases. While experimentation, fluidity, and the malleability of vocabulary, idioms, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs are all possible without word processing, the paper approach to drafting and editing requires significantly more time and effort compared to the time and effort to draft and edit text in a software document. Thus for a given amount of time, more iteration, editing, and polishing can be achieved with word processing than with paper, assuming a proficiency with the software.

How has word processing impacted writing style? It is hard to tell. In addition to Kirschenbaum’s observations, it would be interesting to analyze or access analysis already undertaken to compare corpora before and after the advent of word processing using machine learning to see if software technology has changed the nature of written texts, especially if word processed texts could be labeled. To the extent more iterative editing smooths out awkward syntax, improves transitions, and achieves a higher level rhetorical effectiveness, I might arguably draw a couple of quick conclusions: (1) that readers and writers have benefited from software technology, and (2) that technology has enabled a larger number of people to achieve writing and composition competencies, echoing to some extent the democratizing impact of printing. Yet as we consider the writing of the first 3 quarters of the 20th century before word and text processing, perhaps software technology has merely resulted in a loss of one quality of writing and the gain of another. Perhaps, we have simply engaged in a pragmatic way with writing tools in the same way musicians become one with their instruments through exploration, adaptation, curiosity, sentiment, and, controversially, an overall ignorance of the consequences of these novel toys for humanity as a whole.

When writing for academics, I usually start collecting my ideas in a rough draft. I usually do this process in the Notes of my computer. Later I start collecting sources that will support or contradict my argument preferably in PDF format while doing this I take some notes on them or highlight the parts I find useful. After all the material has been collected I will open a document in Microsoft Word and start typing. When I finish, I will revise everything typed. remove irrelevant information and additional information that will complement what I wrote. Then I will take the document into Grammarly to check for misspellings and grammatical mistakes. Finally, I will send it to peers and professors to revise it through Google Docs, and when they finish with that I will make the necessary corrections. 

It is fascinating how the technologies of writing have influenced my composition process. Just by describing how the process is for me I realize that my work will go through at least five different applications and websites before it is submitted or finalized. However, it was not always this way. As I read Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes I noticed that when computers were introduced for writing they were received with hesitancy. The first ones to adapt to this new technology were Science Fiction writers. Computers were not thought about as being related to literature, however, today if we think of any literary work, we know that it will eventually go through a computer. 

Before reading Track Changes I have not fully appreciated how beneficial the writing technologies of today are. Just now I notice how much more laborious and time-consuming writing would be if computers did not exist. Something thought-provoking for me is that a lot of pressure is taken away from the writer thanks to the new writing technologies. They didn’t have to think about the “perfect introduction” to start writing anymore, in fact, now we can write our introductions when everything else has been written. 

On the MLA Handle book we could see that to cite sources there is a specific formatting that has to be used. For example, using italics. However, for these “rules” to be established, computers have to be accessible for academic writing and they need to have capabilities to format the text in specific ways. They were first only found on Bravo, which was not available to the public yet and only some people had access to it. But now, most computers (if not all) have these different ways to format the text and they are found not only in Microsoft Word but also in a lot of different applications and websites. Computers and new writing technologies have made it a lot more accessible for a wider range of people to be able to create text. 

Technologies of writing impact my composition process in very specific ways. The word processor program “Microsoft Word” can be uploaded onto laptops. Because laptops are portable, my own composition process can take place in just about any environment that I can bring my laptop to and I often write in a variety of places. Keyboard design is also standardized. Any person who spends enough time typing will soon develop muscle memory regarding the placement of letters, numbers, and other symbols, and this has greatly sped up my own composition process. This is obviously different than manually writing something with a pencil or pen, which takes me a much longer time.

            Another plus of using a word processor is the “Copy and Paste” function, which was discussed in our readings.  This has the benefit of saving time and energy by transporting large amounts of text like a quote, or passage to be revised into the word document in an instant, similar to what Seth Grahame-Smith did when writing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Using a word processor also helps the writer save paper, as corrections can be made in the document, and do not have to be done on countless sheets of paper, which in turn helps me and many others save some money.

            On the flipside, when composing something on a word processor like Microsoft Word, which is itself, not a tangible item like a notepad or piece of paper, but a software program, physical copies of a composition are not being gathered. They are also not being physically revised. In order to save a composition, the writer must continually “save” the piece, which poses the risk of losing some if not all of what the writer has written, if there is no automatic “save” function. This has made me a bit of a “manic” saver due to past misfortune.

Millennials and the generation now coming to be known as “gen z” are sometimes referred to as “digital natives.” The usefulness of the term is arguable, as there are many factors other than age that play into whether one grows up with access to computers/devices and thus the online world we are supposedly the natives of, but there are still marked differences in the way many young adults today interact with technology compared to members of previous generations. Generally rhetoric around this concept centers on phones or social media, but today’s readings made me consider it in terms of a foundational aspect of home computing (even typing the phrase sounds so quaint) that I and maybe many of my generation take for granted: word-processing.

“It was like having a chronic pain, a debilitating brain disease, or insufferable stress banished forever. I could begin with what interested me, have fun with it, and continue to have fun until I was finished.” The way Barry B. Longyear describes the advent of word-processing into a life restricted to type-writing resonated with me. The second half of this quote is exactly how I write everything, from academic work to personal essays to fiction—even writing this reading response, I began by transcribing the quote itself, then considered where I wanted to start in framing it, moved slightly up in my Google doc, and began. Doubtless I will pause, rework things, delete others, before I am done. (And here I am, adding and changing even after cutting/pasting from Google docs to WordPress.)

But even though I didn’t have much access to computers or word processors for most of my middle school and high school education (I attended a Waldorf school, whose philosophical underpinnings recommend restricting access to technology, and anyway I am right on the cusp of the age when high school students began regularly submitting their work printed rather than handwritten), I have never felt the crushing weight that Longyear describes in the first half of the above quote. The use of word processing feels second-nature, the idea that you can begin wherever you find the joy and fascination in a written piece obvious. The words on the page appear in straight lines, one after another, yet the idea that composition must be actually linear feels deeply alien to me. When I do write by hand, the pages are always a mess of arrows pointing to blocks at the side of the page, sentences or phrases written sideways to be inserted before other sentences and phrases, stars and symbols leading to the backs of the previous page, whole paragraphs circled and marked so I know to move them later in the piece when I do, inevitably, type it up. I always believed this would be true of me no matter the era, and I’m sure that the linearity of type-writing did not mean that every writer thought linearly—if they had, type-writing would not have been such a terrible burden, as they would have lined their sentences up neatly as they occurred to them and never had to produce more than one draft. However, I wonder to what degree the knowledge that nothing is ever set in stone (on the side of a sphinx, for example, to touch on Robinson) has affected the way ideas occur, the way my brain—and the brains of my contemporaries—sorts through them.