August 20, 2005
Editing: Back to the Typewriter
So one of the strengths - and weaknesses - of writing on the typewriter is the difficulty editing what you write. It is so annoying to go back and revise anything you write while using a typewriter, that you both think through what you are going to say better than you would if you know you have an unlimited number of iterations you could perform, and you also go back and edit mistakes only in extreme cases.
The desktop and laptop computers changed all of this: you know that, when using MS Word, you can edit as much as you like. The result? You write without thinking through it, then rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite.
Does this method produce better writing? The case isn't clear yet because, on the one hand, iterations improve quality; on the other hand, better planning also improves quality. But this is a testable proposition: we can compare the quality of writing, say, 30 years ago to the quality of writing today and see who comes out on top.
Writing obsessively on my new Blackberry recently--my first such device--I've come to regress to writing in the typewriter mode. Writing on the Blackberry I find very easy and I can type on it very quickly, only slightly slower than on a normal keyboard. But moving the cursor around, cutting, pasting--is such a hassle that I avoid it at all costs. I've stopped editing what I write. We've come full circle.
This leaves the question: is my writing on the Blackberry better or worse than my writing on the computer? My friends and colleagues whom I email daily through it can answer that question. But what I can tell you for sure is that, at the very least, anything I write on the Blackberry is full of typos--therefore, judging a work only by its most superficial (used literally: surface-related) and also most objective characteristics, it has gotten much worse.
The funniest part, however, is that I have become so accustomed to writing on the Blackberry these last two weeks that this style has permeated back to all of my other writing. My blog posts one month ago I would edit over and over. This one, I'm on the last sentence now, and I am about to press the 'Save' button on the count of 1, 2, and... 3.
Posted by Morgan at 09:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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