"Because of this awkwardness, the tendency of the typer, as opposed to the writer (in Truman Capote’s famous distinction), is to move ever forward, ever faster. Why waste thirty seconds revising an obscure clause, when you can tack on an explanatory sentence in five? Hence paragraphs come out longer than they should be, and an accretion of verbal debris weighs the typescript down. Such debris, of course, can be cleared away in revision. But the tolerance that permitted it in the first place tends to lower critical standards the second time around. The pen, on the other hand, is an instrument of thrilling mobility. Its ink flows as readily as the writer’s imagination. Its nib flickers back and forth with the speed of a snake’s tongue, deleting a cliché here, an adjective there, then rearing up suddenly into white space and emitting a spray of new words.... Unlike the electric typewriter, it does not buzz irritatedly when motionless, as if to say, Hurry up, I’m overheating. It sits quietly in the hand, comforting the fingers with acquired warmth, assuring you that the sentence you are searching for lies somewhere in its liquid reservoir...."
From the essay "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Smith-Corona" — written in 1981, before writers used word processors.
The essay, by Edmund Morris, is collected in "This Living Hand: And Other Essays" (commission earned).
I added the link on "Truman Capote's famous distinction." My link goes to Quote Investigator, which looks into whether Capote really said — about "On the Road" — "That’s not writing, that’s typing."
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37 comments:
Marvelous! You've turned this reader on to another great writer.
What has the computer done to that faculty of instant revision, expansion, deletion, enrichment --leaving the traces of each? Now we get oblivion, or via "compare-write" some clumsy belated witness to now-mysterious changes we might have made. Just not the same.
Me, I'm going back to that Osmiroid with its medium italic nib and the little chamber through whose windows you could see how much ink you had left.
My dad bought three TI-99/4A computers in 1982 - so he'd have spare parts. They came with a sort of word processor installed. One fun feature was that capital and lower-case letters looked identical, only the lower-case ones were slightly smaller. You saved documents onto a tape drive, and while you could save a document using either upper- or lower-case letters, you could only retrieve the document using upper-case letters. Nowhere was this documented, that we ever saw. It took a LONG time for us to figure it out.
I was a junior in high school and, at first, tried to do a bunch of school assignments on our cool new toy. After having to recreate several from memory because my finished documents were trapped on a cassette tape and I couldn't get them out of it for love or money, I went back to handwriting.
Now - my hand cramps after a woefully short time. And my cursive looks as if I'm writing on a moving train. Maybe I ought to add "do a few minutes of actual hand-writing every day" to my Rule.
I bridged the era between typewriters and word processors. Now, I am not a professional writer- my writing has always been letters, school papers, scientific papers as both a student and professional researcher, and blog comments. The last paper I wrote with a typewriter was in 1989, but the truth is that I didn't write with the typewriter- I wrote everything with a pen, and only when the paper was finished and edited did I transcribe to type-face. At some point, and I don't remember when that point was (probably when I was a graduate student), with access to word processors I stopped writing papers with a pen and did composition directly at the keyboard.
Owen - I recently discovered my long-misplaced jumbled collection of fountain pens. I used to love writing with those things.
Pompous writer bullshit.
At one writing group I attended briefly someone actually said they used a fountain pen because the "liked to feel the flow of the words". That was in 2004, but the bullshit level was the same as "The pen, on the other hand, is an instrument of thrilling mobility.". You can word-pad with a pen just as easily as with a keyboard.
Hence paragraphs come out longer than they should be, and an accretion of verbal debris weighs the typescript down.
That very paragraph is longer than it should be, padded out with touchy-feely words. If you want to write well, first understand grammar; then edit, edit, edit, edit.
A paragraph should be as long as the paragraph needs to be. That has nothing to do with the writing mechanism.
I'm just re-reading parts of Gulliver's Travels. In one experiment, small squares have words written on them. They are put together into a big square, with people standing along the outsides of the square. On a signal, the people pull levers, so that all the words change.
The usual method of “attaining to Arts and Sciences” is extremely laborious; by this projector’s “Contrivance, the most ignorant person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study.” The only outcome so far has been bound volumes of “broken sentences,” but the Projector says he has “made the strictest Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books betweeen the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech.” He seems to be headed down the road to producing a machine that can produce coherent sentences, not quite duplicating sentences that had been produced by human beings. Swift of course takes for granted that this will never work, or will never match the quality of good human writing and thinking. The deeper thought is that technology isn't a tool that we use, while retaining our independent will if not our nature; technology shapes us as we shape it.
I’ve often considered the word processor the enemy of good writers. The ease of revision leads to flabby, careless prose that lacks the tautness necessary for compelling storytelling. Never use 10 words when 100 will do.
Many a great 300-page novel has been published as a bloated 500-page tome.
How funny that Truman Capote's famous distinction went through several revisions.
Back in 1978, i was a student aide at Harper Community College in Palatine, Ill.
My job was to take student programs (on punch cards), give them a ticket, enter them into the queue, tear O/P off of the printer, and return the students punch cards and O/P into their pigeon hole that matched the number on their ticket.
Turnaround time would be 20 minutes to 2 hours (depending). I once set the return display (a paper clock) to 15 minutes (because things were fast), and was told by TPTB NEVER to set it shorter than 20 minutes; because it was spoil the students.
As it was, students would keypunch their program cards, hand them to me, wait 30 minutes, and find out that their program failed to even compile, because they'd mispunched a card.
The thing IS (and This is what makes this relevant) If you've got to manually keypunch your program, and THEN wait 20 minutes (or 2 hours) to see your results.. You VERY QUICKLY LEARN to keypunch correctly, and; in fact, to work your program out mentally (and on paper), BEFORE compiling. This is BETTER.
By the 1990's people would just randomly type in characters until it compiled, then figure it was done.
By the 21st Century, people would just goggle something, and cut and paste, then figure it was done.
See how this compares to writing/Typing/Wordprocessing/Goggling/AI ???
I actually enjoyed "On the Road." When I read it, I thought it was originally composed like this:
"The manuscript was typed on what he called "the scroll"—a continuous, 120-foot (37 m) scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together. The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks. In the following years, Kerouac continued to revise this manuscript, deleting some sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in the 1950s) and adding smaller literary passages."
As it turns out, it was originally written in bits and pieces in notebooks, later revised and condensed. I enjoyed it because I'm a sucker for anything related to travel by road.
I've tried reading ON THE ROAD twice and didn't get past 50 or 60 pages either time. It's just typing.
I recall way back in the dark ages of the mid 1970s when I first used an IBM Selectric typewriter with an erasure ribbon. Those godlike powers of revision I suddenly exercised just by using the whiteout ribbon were a revelation to me of two things. First, I made a lot of typos and my typing needed improvement. Second, and more importantly, if I completed a sentence in my head before typing it, the need for revision of entire phrases was decreased a lot.
As in most of life, think before speaking, look before leaping, have a destination before you start a journey, listen before responding, compose the thought before putting it on paper. And if your necesary information can be documented on a 3"x5" index card, and you have a whole lot of those cards, putting the data in electronic format may be possible, but also superfluous.
gilbar:
By the 1990's people would just randomly type in characters until it compiled, then figure it was done.
By the 21st Century, people would just goggle something, and cut and paste, then figure it was done.
As comic hyperbole, that's good for describing CSI students writing a project. Then of course, you flip the switch and it doesn't do anything.
I interviewed a number who were programatically dumber than a sack of rope.
I've never thought of Kerouac as a typist, but I like that distinction. By that definition, I would also consider Joyce a typist on Finnegan's Wake.
Strangely, the computer era, with its ease on corrections, has the worst typos. In the typewriter days a copy editor was a valued job.
Teacher in 12th grade: On this subject, I want just a 500 word essay. It is due on Monday.
My Buddy (to me): I don't even _know_ 500 words.
Even if I had no arthritis, I would still use the laptop to write (I have written professionally, on and off, since I was 17). My typing skills are about at 95% of the speed of my brain-composing, so it is a good match.
I am currently editing a 400-plus autobiography for someone. I have no use for the proofreading marks I learned early on and utilized as an editor at my high school, college, local weekly newspaper and my own weekly newspaper. While this friend's story is interesting, I am not editing for content, but for technical reasons. He paid someone $2000 to edit this manuscript before I got it and boy, was he played. Here's what I have to deal with throughout this version:
1. Run-on sentences
2. Back and forth between present and past tense.
3. Spelling (not that bad), capitalization, handling of quoted material, subsequent styles of references changing throughout the text, hundreds of the word "actually" in sentences, and other grammatical issues.
I am enjoying it as a drudge through the story and I find that Word is very helpful in doing this editing. When I am done ten pages, I print them out, one at a time, to read. Having the hard copy in front of me, reading slowly to see if I missed inserting a comma between clauses; I send him 10 pages at a time to review so he can compare it to his digital copy of the mannscript.
I save it to OneDrive and to USB and to my laptop -- I don't want my work to disappear.
Lastly, when I was 17, working as a reporter/photographer at the local weekly, I had to cover town council meetings. They occurred Tuesday nights and the paper had to be ready to go to the printer on Wednesday. We would leave a certain amount of column inches on a designated page - enough room for the headline and, depending on the agenda that night, X amount of copy inches.
One night after the meeting, I went to the darkened offices, feed the photo offset paper into a container that was fed by the typist setting type. I knew, after writing and printing the headline, that I had 58 single-column inches. I wrote the story at the keyboard. I hit the feed button to get the last part of the paper from the computer into the safe container to be developed in the darkroom. I cut off the paper where it fed into the cylinder and took it into the darkroom to feed it into the developer and you-know-it: It jammed at the initial feed and there was one inch of paper total that came out and NO story. I had to do it again!
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
I recently did a writing exercise where you retell the story of your most emotional, psychological, physiological stressful event in your life. You limit time to 30-minutes and repeat it over 4-days in a row. Research indicates this boosts Tcell production and stimulates the vagus nerve. (See Andrew Huberman podcast) Apparently it works typing or hand writing.
I did it handwriting and was surprised how weak my hand was. Anyway, by the fourth day, the number of pages stayed the same but the number of details was twice as much.
I identified with much of the excerpt.
For me, as an undergraduate, typewriters made drafting and revising with pen essential.
For longer-form papers, typing usually entailed an "all nighter" from a hand written draft just before it was due.
I graduated before the huge advantage provided by word processors in the ability to update and revise throughout a project, and to print with ease just before publication.
Yet, I do think something important is lost in the prose when drafting and revising entirely avoids the pen to paper step. The semi-permanence of what you put on the tablet, before the noise and impatience of the electric typewriter, engendered a quiet focus and care that cannot be entirely recaptured by the word processor alone.
Omit needless words.
The backspace is the "key" to good Strunkian writing.
tim maguire:
The ease of revision leads to flabby, careless prose that lacks the tautness necessary for compelling storytelling. Never use 10 words when 100 will do.
The last paragraph to one of my books:
Sala was there.
Done with a wp.
Another author rehashing the the story's telling of the relationship between Sala and the just buried could have been flourished-out-the-butt by someone with a pen as well as a wp.
Focus is what's important, not the equipment.
Hell, I just spent about a full minute on that sentence two up.
Shelby Foote was a famous hand-writer. (I need to go see his papers at Rhodes College--he always claimed that he threw out his drafts and notes for the great--but IMHO rather over-rated--Civil War trilogy.)
When I was an undergrad I wrote all my papers by hand and paid someone (a retired Army officer as it happens) to type them up. That was after dropping out of typing class after two days--I was at a university, I thought, why waste time learning to type when there were actual subjects to learn about?
Turns out I had to use an IBM Selectric at work in the library, so by the time of my first bout of grad school I had become a pretty good three-fingered typist. Bought a little cheap-ass word processor and typed for myself afterwards.
Oligonicella said...The last paragraph to one of my books:
Sala was there.
Done with a wp.
I was talking about general trends in writing, not about you specifically. Curious that you thought otherwise.
@Narr:
I have a horror story for you. A friend of mine, Professor Turlek, was as he said, a "seek and ye shall find" typist and it took him forever to enter programs.
What's relevant is that his degree is in physics and his thesis was hand written.
He hired someone to type it and once returned, he discovered that every "iff" had been replaced with "if". I'm sure only some of you groaned outright at that.
The word "iff" in math means "if and only if". She had demolished much of his logic and had to retype the whole thing.
Robert Cook said...
I've tried reading ON THE ROAD twice and didn't get past 50 or 60 pages either time. It's just typing.
I've made it partway through. It's like 90% boring crap, but that other 10% is almost, but in my opinion, not quite, worth the slog. BTW, he did type it on a scroll but it that was only a part of it. (see <a href="https://www.npr.org/2007/07/05/11709924/jack-kerouacs-famous-scroll-on-the-road-again</a>.)
I re-discovered typewriters about 5 years ago. When I was a kid (graduated HS in 1980) I hated the damn things. <I>Hated</I> 'em. I wrote by hand and then copied with typewriter, and still hated 'em. Moved to computers as soon as I possibly could. I would never write anything of importance on a typewriter. As it is, I edit as I'm writing (technical/research papers and such), but also save drafts Just In Case.
I have 20+ typewriters now, all old manuals except for two electrics. I use them for writing letters and enjoy it immensely. People absolutely love getting typewritten letters. Oddly, I tend to write more fluidly on a typewriter (I also hardly ever correct anything, or even read what I've already written). You'd think one would carefully consider each word before committing it to paper, but I work just the opposite. I quit using them for a month thinking it might have been giving me forearm problems, and figured I could just write the same letters on my computer. Nuh-uh. It was a <I>much</I> slower process, because, I think, I knew I had the ability to constantly edit everything so I felt like I <I>had</I> to. If you watch the documentary "California Typewriter" John Mayer (of all people) explains this well.
I guess that's a long way of saying that the thing you write with does change the way you write. I won't say any of it is better or worse, just different. YMMV and all that.
Typewriter keys come up in this Adrienne Rich parody
The Griefs of Women
The griefs of women are quiet, rustle
like crinoline or whisper like
the tearing of old silk;
hum like appliances, give off the sharp sweet smell
of burnt out motors; tap like typewriter keys.
The strengths of women are quiet,
but hardy as the weed that finds its cranny
between the concrete block of the sidewalk
and the concrete slab of the wall, and grows there,
and blooms there.
Men are bums.
We're really better than they are.
Brand X Poetry "The Griefs of Women" after Adrienne Rich
Jamie @ 8:33: "...And my cursive looks as if I'm writing on a moving train." Mine also, but the moving train has derailed and the cars are gyrating wildly.
Lloyd W. Robertson @ 9:04: thanks for giving us a new look at Jonathan Swift. What a genius. I had forgotten, or perhaps never known of his Projectors' invention, which clearly anticipates Chatbot GPT.
I have tried to keep my printing to a minimum. I have found that in the past year, if I am printing "fast", I skip over a letter to the next one. I realized then that that particular defect, combined with nervous and constant touching of areas of my body that are itchy or just "bothering" me (even to a tiny degree), might be somehow related to the genetic trait of Tourette Syndrome that my father had. And, my memory! Just now I could not remember and come up with the words of "Tourette Syndrome" even though I am writing about it AND it is an important portion of the book I am editing. Lately, I will be talking to someone (or posting something on Facebook) and I can't remember a person's name that I know very well.
I started writing this comment and went off on a tangent:
One of the ways I can force something into my memory is to write it out longhand. Typing on a word processor to achieve the same end is not as effective in that technique.
Narr @ 10:29: I was the guy who typed papers for guys like you in college. My secret weapon was Eaton "Corrasable" paper. The whole business proved almost daily that my Grade 9 typing course was the most valuable in my entire scholastic career. Dear Miss Fredeen, wherever you are, thanks again.
Oligonicella @ 10:28: "...Hell, I just spent about a full minute on that sentence two up."
And yet --the sentence contains a duplicate word ["the"]: "...Another author rehashing the the story's telling..."
Self-proofing is damnably hard. I am far from perfect but I did get schooled at the financial printer's, where in my day young lawyers were sent to pull all-nighters as the proxy statement or 10-K or merger papers were put into final form. Ever since I find typo's like little thorns hooking my eye...
It was in the early 90's that books got thicker, much thicker. I used to call them word processor books. But I suspect the cause was more a shift in publishing from magazines to books. So maybe I should have called them offset printing books, but there was probably a synergy: word processing -> computerized layout -> offset printing. The printing step can be skipped these days. The same sort technology change has also affected movies. I suppose we can blame computers and the universal digitization and the automation that followed.
Sometimes I admit that it is kind of astonishing when I cut and paste a short passage into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it more concisely and it does it, and it comes out better. This works not just for my prose, but for a lot of writers.
tim maguire:
I was talking about general trends in writing, not about you specifically. Curious that you thought otherwise.
I didn't take it personally. What I wanted to convey was that perhaps bad writers overuse wp editing on their careless prose and not that access to it makes bad writers. Poorly set up on my part.
And, yes, many thanks Owen. :) I've found typos in my books as I reformatted them. Depends on the extent as to the effort to correct.
Fortunately, this is banter so I'm less concerned.
I meant to say "writing it out in print (not cursive for me) many, many times, until I can do it without looking at the original sentence, phrase or paragraph....and then many MORE times until I have it memorized. That test comes days later, weeks later, et cetera.
Not a brilliant technique, but it works for me
I meant to say "writing it out in print (not cursive for me) many, many times, until I can do it without looking at the original sentence, phrase or paragraph....and then many MORE times until I have it memorized. That test comes days later, weeks later, et cetera.
Not a brilliant technique, but it works for me
The essayist seemingly stole this idea from the 1980 novel "Still Life with Woodpecker" by Tom Robbins. The Robbins starts the novel stating that he just bought a new electric typewriter to write the book. He interjects his experience with the Remington SL3 throughout the book and ends the book in long hand. Very humorous.
chuck said...
It was in the early 90's that books got thicker, much thicker. I used to call them word processor books. But I suspect the cause was more a shift in publishing from magazines to books.
My informal observation is that dissertations and masters theses became much longer after the advent of the computer.
The brilliant first page of "Still Life with Woodpecker", 1980:
If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done. This is the all-new Remington SL3, the machine that answers the question, "Which is harder, trying to read The Brothers Karamazov while listening to Stevie Wonder records or hunting for Easter eggs on a typewriter keyboard?" This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empress card. I sense that the novel of my dreams is in the Remington SL3--although it writes much faster than I can spell. And no matter that my typing finger was pinched last week by a giant land crab. This baby speaks electric Shakespeare at the slightest provocation and will rap out a page and a half if you just look at it hard. "What are you looking for in a typewriter?" the salesman asked. "Something more than words," I replied. "Crystals. I want to send my readers armloads of crystals, some of which are the colors of orchids and peonies, some of which pick up radio signals from a secret city that is half Paris and half Coney Island." He recommended the Remington SL3. My old typewriter was named Olivetti. I know an extraordinary juggler named Olivetti. No relation. There is, however, a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like part of the act. I have in my cupboard, under lock and key, the last bottle of Anaiis Nin (green label) to be smuggled out of Punta del Visionario before the revolution. Tonight, I'll pull the cork. I'll inject ten cc. into a ripe lime, the way the natives do. I'll suck. And begin ... If this typewriter can't do it, I'll swear it can't be done...
"The way I do things is superior, not only artistically, but even morally. That's what it means to be a great writer like me."
Plato, Augustine, Dante - they all used fountain pens, right?
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