I was talking to two university students last week - one aged 40, the other 20 - and was surprised to learn that both of them still write their essays by hand. Sure, they both have computers, use email and the Internet, but they said they couldn’t “think” and edit via the keyboard.
I clearly remember making the switch from writing by hand to writing onto the screen when I first started using a computer - way back in 1983. (I managed to bypass typewriters altogether, in a quirk of my own personal history.)
At first I had to write my articles (I worked on a magazine) by hand, type them into the computer and then edit them. I couldn’t do original thinking while typing. But it didn’t take long before I was able to bypass that first handwritten draft and be mentally creative via the keyboard. Now I can’t for the life of me remember how I actually wrote university essays by hand back in the 70s - the writing/editing process is so enmeshed for me now that I can’t imagine not being able to revise every sentence 20 times as I go along - including immediately after first writing it.
In the same way, I now can’t remember what life online was like before Google - yet I was online for years before they were. Yes there were other search engines, though I don’t recall using them in the everyday way I now use Google (and occasionally other engines.) (Which isn’t to say I didn’t use them - I remember using Excite, though not every day.)
What was life online like when I first ventured into cyberspace in early 1996? I wish I could remember what I looked at on the Web the very first day and how I knew where to look. No one else I knew in real life went online, except to do email. Well, if they were delving into the Web, they didn’t talk about it to me. I did keep a notebook of URLs which I visited in those first months (before I figured out how to keep bookmarks). I stumbled from site to site (and back again), following links and suggestions according to my interests. I’d type the full URL into the nav bar and wait for it to load (dial-up, of course.) I looked in on Usenet and subscribed to a few discussions there. Primarily, I joined email discussion groups (known as listserves), which I found via websites. (This was years before Yahoo Groups.) There were also lists of lists (one was known as Lizsts, in fact). I can remember reading a book guide to cyberspace which gave me ideas for where to go.
It was very much like reading a science fiction novel and entering a world that was somehow partly in my own head and partly in the book - or in this case, in the computer. At that time, many years before it became usual to see URLs on TV or in advertising, cyberspace was almost like a hidden, closed world of its own. Of course it wasn’t closed (else how would any of us have got into it) - yet it was seperate from the “real world” in a way that it isn’t today. In those first few months, each website felt like a different character or place within this strange new world. And then the human characters began to speak their roles in the email groups I belonged to - which I now think of as very much precursors to blogworld. Very quickly I had an entire cast of “characters” carrying on a conversation in my mind, who no one else in my life knew.
A major characteristic of this Web was that it was American. I’d visited the US and had American friends (who didn’t live there), but being online was like suddenly being inside America in a way that was disconcerting. Of course there was the odd Australian or Canadian voice, but the WWW in its early days was very dominated by Americans, who spoke to each other as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. (Has anything changed?)
Fortunately there is no beginning date for the World Wide Web which can be marked as an official anniversary. There are only private anniversaries. I began thinking about all of this because one of the email lists I still belong to has begun making plans for a real-life gathering to celebrate 10 years of our group early next year. That in itself is no longer unusual - I’ve belonged to another online group for longer. I’ve met several cyber people in the flesh and made ongoing friendships with some of them, such that I almost forget that I first met them via my computer.
Yet it’s fascinating to me to go back and think about the mental shifts I had to make when I first went online. Cyberspace was literally a mind-expander! It was as though the internal architecture of my mind changed - but I find it very hard to describe this even to myself. I now find it hard to remember what I thought about and how I thought about it before I was “connected”. [Occasionally I feel nostalgic for that state of mind - but not very often.]
I wonder if younger people who’ve been online since childhood or early teen years have that experience or if their brains just wire themselves around the fact of cyberconnectivity.
Can you remember first going online? Where did you go? How did you know to go there? And how did it feel, mentally?
I recall being at university at not allowed to use the intertubes. I had a friend in IT who gave me the info on how to bypass the system to get online at uni. I used netscape and my search engine was alta vista!
It wasn’t anything like it is now, and the few websites around were plain backgrounds with blinking text, and the pictures took FOREVER to come up. I remember going to rotten.com a lot, sicko that I am.
Two quick comments because I’ve got to get back to marking some hand written exams!
When I tell students that I used to write essays on a typewriter, they’re normally shocked. It did make you think a lot before you wrote, because the process of making corrections was so painful.
I first went online in 1992 - back in the AarNet days - I couldn’t understand the point of it - as I vaguely recall, most of the interface was kinda dos like. I got into it again in 96 when I started doing a postgrad diploma, but didn’t have net at home til 98 - despite the slow speed, and the rather badly designed look of most webpages, it didn’t feel too different from how it does now. I do recall thinking at the time that the affect, almost, of the experience of being online felt distinctly different from anything else I’d felt.
What a great post, and what memories it calls up.
Perforce and practically overnight, the university department I worked in went fully-computerised around 1990, and as far as reading emailed memos and keeping networked records went it was very definitely sink or swim, since it didn’t occur to anyone in charge till years later that if we had to use these things it might be nice to get a bit of in-house training. We used Macs with Netscape, Eudora for email and FileMaker Pro for records. For years I had no idea there were other options.
The composing-onto-the-keyboard thing marked a major change in the way I write, not just the mechanics but the whole conceptual process. Back in the handwriting and then the typing days, you might start by sketching out a plan, but it was still essentially a matter of ‘Start at the beginning, keep going till you reach the end, then stop.’
But as soon as I began experimenting with composing directly onto the screen, I realised that instead of expanding from the top down, like a piece of knitting, the things I was writing were now expanding from within, at strategic points in the middle, like cell division. I’d write something, look at it, and then expand on particular sentences in different places. And I soon found that my whole way of thinking about thinking had changed — my writing/thinking had become far less linear and far more three-dimensional.
I can understand the handwriting thing — it’s incredibly powerful and personal. But it militates against effective self-editing: the sight of your own handwriting skews your judgement about how the piece could be better, since it’s a direct bodily trace and profoundly identified with the self. Once you depersonalise a piece of writing by putting it into typeface, it’s far easier to look at it critically and see what’s the matter with it.
(Profound apologies to any former student here who has already heard me banging on ad nauseam about this.)
For me. . . I became aware of email and USENET and Gopher (wow) in the first month of my DPhil, in 1991. Had a Departmental VAX account, and then we moved to Unix a few years later on a machine called ‘Worf (’big, ugly and speaks a strange language’). Access to these was all via Macs. Got my own Mac in 1994, an LC475 that soldiered on until two years ago, to write up my thesis.
All my University essays were hand-written (how do kids cope with exams these days?).
We used Archie in the early days, and then some real Heath Robinson sequence search engines, before it all got a lot more professional in the mid-90s. Mmm, NCSA Mosaic. That was fun.
Previously, I wasn’t really interested in computers - the ZX Spectrums (spectra!) and BBC-Bs that all the geek kids had at school were a closed book to me, although my parents bought a Memotech MTX and I learned some BASIC. But today one of the IT support guys said of me, in my presence, “He’s more of a geek than me”.
I’d have to think about how it has all affected my writing though.
I often think about how I have an almost visceral love relationship to the handwriting of my oldest friends, because we so regualrly used to write letters to each other. All email, unfortunately, looks much the same, so I don’t have that emotional relationship to the actual typeface used by my different e-friends. [Though I think I have vestiges of it in my feelings about their email addresses!]
I have not got time to write a more interesting comment Suz, but I have to echo P.Cat. Terrific post and thanks for writing it. Food for thought to last for days. In the future they will wonder why we all carried on about such minor-seeming concerns when this major revolution changed us so much and we hardly even appeared to notice.
Absolutely. It’s off-topic if only at a tangent, but in my early blogging days I wrote a post on the power of handwriting that you might like.
A person with average cognitive and fine-motor abilities can, with suitable training:
Think at over 200 words per minute
Talk at 120-180 words per minute
Type at 60-70 words per minute
Text message at 20 words per minute
Hand-write at 15 words per minute.
Suz, those associates of yours who have trouble thinking at the keyboard might be…slow thinkers?
My geek biography is: online since ‘92, earliest memories are “surfing” at 2400bps on Telnet, BBSs, ASCII-art, MUDs, MOOs, and making a tech support call at midnight to OzEmail’s 24-hour free support line (remember those?), to be answered by…Sean Howard!
I was about 10 in 1995 and had seen an “a Current Affair” report where they were hyping up the fact that kids could easily view porn on the internet. They put a camera on a kid who was about my age typing “XXX”. So when I was given an oppurtunity on the internet at a friends of our parents place, the first thing I did was type “sex”, “XXX” etc. into the yahoo search engine and went about by a simple click assuring the webpages that I was over 18/21. Seems hilarious in retrospect, but I had not even thought about the first time I remember using the internet until I read this post. Maybe I had used it before than at school, but I dont remember it if I did. Unlike you, I used search engines all the time from the first time that I used the internet. It just seemed the easy way of searching for something. I probably use them alot less now.
Just quickly, (great post Suz), I’m reading Don Mackenzie’s 2001 book on computing at the moment. He got in touch with a number of computer science professors via email for the research, assuming that would be the most expedient. One of them was adamant that it ‘encouraged malformed communication’ and avoided it. Several hand wrote lectures with fountain pens, one supervised a hand written PhD! I wonder if their habits have changed?
Surely that can’t be right?
That’s why I believe that science should focus on a direct brain to computer cable. When I compose articles in my head, they’re always better than whatever I end up typing (and courtesy of Mr Paul Keating’s labour market programs, as an unemployed Arts graduate in 1995, I was kindly taught to touch type. I also topped the receptionist exam at my training provider! But ended up opting for a different career…).
A perennial debate, of course, is whether or not Power Point is a *good thing*. I was quite partial to overheads myself, because they’re a nice way to pace a lecture, but back in the day, we students had to write notes for everything the lecturer said since there were no visual/textual aids.
Then there’s the “does browsing through physical bookshelves help you find more relevant stuff than library or database search engines?”.
I’m agnostic, with a lean towards the Luddite answer to both questions.
I suspect, for instance, you wouldn’t find a good explanation of what the actual Luddites were about easily via a google search.
Fabulous post, Suz.
My experience was very similar to yours. Netscape, AltaVista, discovering the Yahoo groups (I didn’t discover UseNet, like you, before it became the “groups�.)
I read Dale Spender’s Nattering on the Net when I first began using it. I think that really encouraged me and enhanced my enjoyment, because there’s so much negativity out there – you know, the net is just a whole lot of rubbish, it’s just for pr0n etc and everyone is a loony stalker… Spender seemed to “get it� from very early on in Web history and the book was really a joyful celebration of what you could do with the new tech.
My first group was the Angelman’s List which was for parents and carers of children with Angelman’s syndrome, which is very rare. So my first forays into the net were pretty much via an email list which dropped into my inbox rather than me having to browse for it. I was soon deeply impressed with the way in which the internet could bring together people who had so much in common, but were spread out all over the US and other countries. (Yes Suz, the net was and still is very US-centric!) These people gave each other help and support and just a bit of conversation with other people who understood what was happening with them! Of course it went beyond just what should I do with this feeding tube or should I change the meds, and became a social support group. The web is an absolute boon to isolated carers and people with special interests or needs. I wish the naysayers would think of that sort of thing.
It was an eye opener for me when I discovered MSN groups. There were Australian groups discussing current affairs and it just blew me away how reactionary and racist my countrymen and women were. I suppose I kind of knew but repressed the knowledge. This was during the Pauline Hanson era. I became a neurotic compulsive re-educator of everyone especially the MRA contingent (Hi, “anti-femonazi�, have you learned to spell yet?) I eventually learned this was doomed to failure. I remember spending a Saturday morning finding legislation on the web to prove some fact to some dork who just turned around and flat-out contradicted me again. That was a waste of time. I was invited to join a private MSN board which featured some high profile people (under assumed identities), that was pretty right wing except for me and about 2 others so it really honed my arguing skills.
Fast forward a few years and I find Margo Kingston’s Webdiary. One day I clicked on one of her links which led me to a thing called a blog…
In reply to:
“I was talking to two university students last week - one aged 40, the other 20 - and was surprised to learn that both of them still write their essays by hand. Sure, they both have computers, use email and the Internet, but they said they couldn’t “thinkâ€? and edit via the keyboard.”
I find I need to take lots of notes when learning and you can’t always be stationed in front of a desktop or laptop when learning takes place. I also prefer to read directly from newspapers and magazines than read them online (I even go to a cafe especially on a Saturday Morning to pull apart The Weekend Australian and The Age and relax with a Coffee).
On the other hand, writing on paper and reading from paper makes it very hard for me to “tame the paper tiger”. Until now, I’ve been incredibly hopeless at keeping a paper-based system, while also learning there’s no way of completely getting rid of paper either.
So, the main computer I’ve been using for my studies is a very small pocket PC. I am gradually learning how to make this a solution.
I much prefer to take notes using my own handwriting, which the pocket PC instantly transcribes into text. The text can then be stored and filed on the spot and uploaded to a laptop computer later. The more experienced I become with using the feature, the more it becomes not much different to writing on paper.
The only problem with this solution is that the battery life of my pocket PC is very poor. Hopefully a future upgrade will fix that.
…From Justin
suz
Your surprise certainly makes sense. But during the past six months I have adopted the attitude of the 20 year olds you mention. I had a horrible experience last year, when I submitted a lengthy essay, and my lecturer found a significant amount of plagiarism from the web in it (all essays are submitted to Turnitin). I was mortified. He did not take any action as he could tell that the “Plagiarised” stuff was not as good as my own.
It comes from reading journals on the Internet, and rather than paying a fortune to print every one out, I copied and pasted slabs into my essay, intending to “tidy them up” later. There was even some stuff from Wikipedia plagaiarised, which was the most embarrassing, especially as it was wrong!
Well, after moving floppie discs and more copying and pasting plus my own editing, etc. eventually a lot of the copied stuff no longer looked any different from my own work. Don’t worry, he gave me a week to fix it up and gave me an HD!
Now, I print all journal articles out and use a notepad and pen. I even write the introduction in pen first.
I have found that not only is there no plagiarism, but as I am summarising from the journal article I use my own language, contribute my own commentary and the whole thing flow so much more smoothly.
A very strange lesson to learn, but there it is.
LG - lucky you’re not one of my students. Best you can hope for would be a re-submit for a maximum grade of a bare pass.
And that’s for the first offence - after that it’s straight to the academic misconduct panel.
I call hoax. You have *got* to be legpulling now, John.
Me too, FDB.
I’m sick of it, and reading the excuses. There are always excuses!
Declining academic standards. Westen civ in crisis. Yoof today have no concept of responsibilities. Ho. Hum. *adjusts pipe, checks wearing corduroy jacket with leather patches on elbow*
I’ll mention this to Dr Donnelly next time we take port in the Upper Common Room.
/runs away to Uni to submit exam marks.
FDB
Given your own obvious issues with keyboards, you are in no position to be throwing stones. Choke on your own petard you sanctimonious ponce.
Mystery solved John!
chav
You show me your IQ, I’ll show you mine, big boy.
Oh and you would do well to learn the difference between ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal.’
You evidently missed the “reading for irony” module in Academic Standards 101, John!
/turns Schubert off, really does run away to uni this time, running slowed by incipient gout of course.
Ahh (nerd) memories…of the Apple2c with that mind-numbing game called “lemonade”…being told by my year 7 high-school teacher that using a text editor (on a 80286) was not acceptable for assignments!
Shoot through to the late 90’s when typing my thesis on Word 2 and being told be a stodgy old Physics lecturer that “Latek is the best form of writing because it allows one to fully control the look of the equations” (…shudder…).
Paying penance (beer) to the God’s of university computing for recovering the infamous “lost” assignment…
Observe the complete lack of structure, form or indeed grammer that results from many years of on-screen writing - the horror, the horror!
I used to do all my uni essays by hand. Home computers were practically non-existent because of the cost and laptops didn’t exist (showing my age now, hehe).
The way I hand wrote essays was similar to the PC’s computer based writing ie “expanding from within, at strategic points in the middle, like cell division. I’d write something, look at it, and then expand on particular sentences in different places.”
It is a lot easier to do this on a computer than it is on paper. My first drafts ended up a complete mess with arrows, number references all over the place where new bits had to be inserted.
I started using computers at uni in 1996, although - strangely - kept on hand writing some of my essays until second year (? I think. Not sure about that one.) I had strange preferences - I liked to use Macs (not because it was efficient, because that’s what my parents had) and AltaVista. (I liked the name. When the computer turned on, a whole page opened out with links to Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, and so on.)
I didn’t use email until my third year, and then quite sparingly. Sometimes I used to go to the library and type random search strings into AltaVista, and read the pages that came up.
I got involved in blogging quite slowly. When I left uni I became involved as a volunteer at a computer place, and this was my first experience at creating text for web. It was a teaching experiment for kids that kind of, er, got out of hand.
Later Imre Salusinszky - who I ran into at Newcastle University while I was doing an interview, or something, I can’t remember - told me about Tim Blair’s ‘website’. This was back in the old timblair.blogspot.com days. And I gradually became familiar with the mainstream Aussie blogs.
John:
Cripes, you sure take spelling mistakes hard doncha? I’ll have you know, my petards blow with the freshness of a summer breeze through a pine-banked fjord, so take your attitude and cram it with walnuts.
Enjoyed all these comments, esp Mark and Pavlov’s Cat.
When I started some studies I clung to handwriting with much gravitas, as being in harmony with “creativity”.
Nothing whatsoever to do with an inner psychic wound to my sensitive dignity, borne heroically for eons arising from an awareness of personal computer illiteracy, of course.
After a year of being innundated with mountains of my own “binned” quarter-written essays, I abandoned this mode in favour of PC’s, although with much grief and the usual abiding sense of persecution: I have no talent for things mechanical and spatial.
I guess the thing that stands out to me is that computers, like university libraries, are phenomena that one can barely even scratch the surface of, as to the understanding, in a life time. I wish I had a few million years spare for preliminary exploration of both.
I wrote my Honours thesis in 1983 fully fully by hand and then it was typed by a professional service.
My Masters was written in pencil (still a pretty good word processor) and then re-typed on a mainframe computer called ‘Ludwig’. No WYSISWG Windows here.
You connected to a terminal and use a text-based WordPerfect software. What you worked on was on those old screens which had the green writing on black. The pagination was a hit and miss affair (and sometime wasted rims of paper to get it right).
The data was saved on huge floppy disks (and they were floppy, that was before the 3 1/4″ hard disks).
As an aside I was taking to a trainer who teaches University students about searching the library catalogue and electronic resources. The icon for ’save’ is a little drawing of a floppy disks and some first year engineering students did not know what they were…it’s a flash drive world now.
Re:Gravatar icon
Mark on 28 June 2007 at 2:37 pm
I think the introduction of wikipedia has helped solve many problems for the old adage of 250 000 pages found and only a hundred of them that are not crap. As for Luddite search, judge for yourself, [link] Search
The icon for ’save’ is a little drawing of a floppy disks and some first year engineering students did not know what they were…it’s a flash drive world now.
My eight year old recently did a computing exam in which he was asked (multiple choice) what that floppy disk icon stands for. He got it wrong as he’s only ever used Macs, which don’t use that icon at all (let alone knowing what a floppy is).
I set up as a consultant in 1993 having never turned a computer on in my life. I knew I’d need to learn so I bought a package deal from Osborne, who went broke eventually courtesy of their excellent 5 year warranties (they replaced everything on mine … the motherboard twice). Anyway I took it all home and plugged it in following the instructions and took it from there … talk about fools rush in :-D.
Fortunately I’d been typing since my youth (Dad was an old army/public service clerk and we had a manual typewriter at home). Industry’s failure to train the workforce in touch-typing during the 1980s/90s is one of the greatest vocational training oversights in history.
I honestly can’t remember how I first started using the tubes. It was about 1996, a Bigpond CD was involved and the dialup connection was a constant problem. Being completely self-taught has the virtue of inspiring confidence that I can figure out any IT stuff if I work at it, but it also means I still get embarrassed occasionally when I find out there’s a straightforward solution to something that’s been bugging me for years.
I still shun help files though … it’s not the Australian way.
It worries me that fine motor skills can be part of a comparison with typing skills,I am left handed,do demanding physical work sometimes,and just finger type.Even though I have an eyesight problem most of the time my reflexes and peripheral vision are intact.I came off the slow blog site to this its 6.00pm. And I hope we never have a direct brain link and the one I have now…. drops out forever.
I grew up using computers for just about everything school related, certainly from grade 7 on. Can’t imagine hand-writing an assignment, mostly because I wouldn’t be able to read my own drafts >.> . Pavlov’s Cat hit it right on the head with the tendency towards non-linear composition - I read a paper, write a few random sentences, move on to the next paper, and slowly piece together an assignment by rearrangement and gap-filling. Can’t say I ever dared cut’n'paste, I knew I’d stuff up and leave unmodified chunks lying around. Gotta say though, I still can’t read a .pdf document on screen - it has to be hardcopy or I just can’t concentrate on it. Its odd, because I have no trouble reading ordinary webpages. Anyone else have that problem?
Can’t say I look back at the old days with much fondness, apart from the games. Clunky hardware, horrible interfaces, slow connections, RIPieces. Ahhh, to be hogging the computer for hours, me and my brother slogging through Fallout and Half-Life, driving our parents to distraction… good times!
The typing/handwriting distinction is a strange one. I suppose I do think differently when I type to when I write things out in hand, but I’m not sure if that is a result of the writing process itself, or how I’m thinking before I start writing. I used to write everything out long-hand, especially long school essays. Then I got into the habit of writing things out and punching them into the computer. When I was in Newcastle and became involved in a youth magazine, I really started writing things in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher - this made me think more about formatting, etc, but mostly I didn’t bother about that stuff. When I really started blogging heavily, I became accustomed quite quickly to distilling my thoughts into a comments or a publishing box, and then clicking the publishing button.
The distinctions between different types of writing aren’t hard and fast; I tend to write article or ‘opinion-column’ style pieces on computer, but I have also been known to do it with a piece of paper. I often write poetry or stories on paper, but then again, sometimes I’ll do them on computer. Oh, and sometimes I’ll even make these, which do necessitate a little thought about formatting.
I suppose the writer and the medium are in a constant dance; the writer derives inspiration from the medium, and the medium is modified by the writer. (That’s not a good explanation, but that metaphor is the best I can come up with at the moment.) The great beauty of programs like Microsoft Word and Publisher is that they have all sorts of interesting side-functions that you can learn from: fonts, pictures, and so on.
I use computers for all my assignments. In some cases I have no choice as projects have to be submitted online rather than as a hard copy.
This whole ‘internet’ thing is just a fad, like hypercolour and ‘environmental management’. It’ll all blow over soon, and you’ll all look so silly.
About two years ago it occurred to me that my keyboard was demanding daily address. I’d survived happily without one for half a century, so what was the lure now? Being frog-marched by the bank into performing online fund transfers, playing at being a cockroach capitalist as an online trader, and a quick squizz at the Oz and o/s papers was fine and dandy. Discovering the quality blogosphere is what did me in.
It also saved my partner from going insane because she’d had a “gutful of hearing about George Bush and John Howard” and therapeutically for me, I was able to “tell somebody who cares”.
Suz wrote: “I often think about how I have an almost visceral love relationship to the handwriting of my oldest friends, because we so regularly used to write letters to each other.”
Yes, suz, when faxes first arrived, communication with “oldest friends” was faster than slug mail, but at least it was still handwriting, till the faxes too, unlike the black Quink ink of letters past , eventually faded to white. Never having had to type, I was telephonically coerced over the course of a few months, into responding to emails, since one had been thoughtfully “set up” on my behalf with a “moron-proof” password, to boot. Failure to participate would have been viewed as “an act of gross selfishness”. With a thirty-five year friendship in jeopardy of being rigged for silent running, a good thirty at least, spiced with weekly or bi-weekly exchange of handwritten letters, I took my first tentative taps at communicating via teh intertubes. The blog habit kicked in soon after. Best of all, a treasured friendship thrives, although the thrill is gone when I walk by my letter box.
From Pav’s link: “Handwriting’s what Frank Moorhouse would call strong magic, an extension of both the body and the soul. You’ve got to hope that in the age of keyboards, keypads and voice-recognition software, it won’t die out completely. Too much would be lost.”
Pav, “tangentialâ€?? Nah. That’s a bulls-eye.
Writing by hand now feels laborious, awkward and unnatural. The writing looks stilted.
Only problem I have with getting words on paper is when the ink cartridge runs out.
Because at some point, some bastard thought that the perfect musical accompaniment for getting an essay in 15 minutes before deadline was the sound of a dot matrix printer head working its way across a sheet of computer paper.
I loved hand-written essays, never knew how they were going to end.
The introduction of wordprocessers had a very significant impact on my marks, and therefore my life. Through my primary school years every report praised my skills in everything other than handwriting (atrocious) and spelling (poor). My teachers constantly expressed concern to my parents that if my handwriting didn’t improve people would not take the care they did to wade through and find the merit of my content.
Things didn’t change very much at high school, except for my French and Latin teachers who concluded that even when they could read my work it had no merit anyway.
Still, the year 12 examiners obviously put in the effort and I had no trouble getting into uni. However, my first essays didn’t get good marks at all. I assumed this was just because of the higher standard required at university. However, when my father bought a word processor I figured that using it might help with the readability factor.
Instantly my marks jumped 15%. I instantly adopted an approach of writing a bunch of paragraphs with no particular order to them, then shifting them around, linking them together and adding an introduction which was far better than what I could manage before.
Presumably this contributed, but I couldn’t shake the suspicion that part of it was just that deciphering my ugly scrawl was so painful that I’d been marked down for it. Certainly my tutors (including Pavlov’s Cat) were grateful - at that time less than a third of students were using word processors. However, even when more took it up my marks stayed high - it seems others didn’t get the same benefit I did.
Having been labouriously taught old-style cursive penmanship at school (yes, with the fountain pens and the Quink and the squirting and the placing of open ink bottles on ceiling fan blades before they were switched on), I always felt it was shame to let such an arcane skill go to waste.
So I amuse myself from time to time by penning and posting handwritten letters. especially when they are not expected by the receipent. (…In regards to your text message of 14 May, I am delighted to inform you that I will be available for drinks this Friday at the designated rendevous…)
And who doesn’t like receiving a real letter from time to time?
However after about four paras my hand starts to hurt.
nn
nn
Interesting point. I’ve often felt that composing with word-processing software is like growing a plant. You plant a seed, prune here, graft there, bend branches that way and generally supervise the growth of the text. Whereas handwriting something is like laying a road where you need to put together the pieces in a certain order from foundations first to signage last and then at the end realise it’s heading in a direction, with unscheduled branch roads, that wasn’t specified in the original plans.
From cursive to discursive is only three letters.
Great post suz!
I started with the interwebs in ‘97 when I started my undergrad at UQ. Before that year I had only used DOS and pre-95 Windows machines.
I got hooked into using my uni email account daily. All the physics undergrads primarily used email to communicate. This was considered to be ultra-weird by all of my old school buddies who had also gone to UQ. I remember that the disk quotas were miniscule (I think it might have been 30 MB a month back then). They were so small that a blackmarket in disk space existed, I remember one of my best mates sold his disc quota and completely unused email address for $20 to another friend.
In those days it was the norm for the science and engineering undergrads to waste time chatting using the UNIX chat system. This was a precursor to the modern day IM programs we have nowadays. People would always check to see who was online on the student network and would use the “talk” command to have little IM chats. It seems really pre-historic nowadays but really the only difference between what we were doing and, say, google talk was the the graphical user interface (oh, and the whole telephony thing).
I’ve lived in the same house as a computer since I was four, and throughout high school I used both handwriting and word processors for my assigments.
All my university assignments were done on computer– I had to occaisonally do a handwritten essay for an exam, and all my notes were handwritten (at that stage, it still looked wanky to bring your laptop into uni). I did handwrite a the first draft of part of my honours thesis, one day when I wanted to spend some time in the sun (and didn’t want to carry my laptop around), and that actually put me onto something really good– I realised that when I went to type it up, having to physically re-write every word really helped clarifying my revision process. After that, for all my important writing, I’ve created two distinct drafts, both on the computer. When I feel the first draft is ready, I re-type every word.
I am doing my PhD now, and I honestly don’t know how I would have done it without word processing and the internet. Of course, back in the day, it was okay to take 10-12 years to complete your thesis, rather than rushing to get it done in 3-4 years.
I used to write my essays by hand at uni, cut up the pieces of paper and stick them above my desk for a while to play with the order. Eventually I’d sticky tape them together and then write the final version from that. I talked to my girlfriends about writing a communal “book of paragraphs”.
I got a second hand mac eventually, but mostly we played risk on it when pissed.
I did the “morning pages” for a very long time, and they had to be done by hand. It was an interesting way to see patterns that could get erased too quickly to notice on a pc.
FDB
Clearly, you also played hookie during Mark’s Irony 101 classes.
Not really. I am just a fucking rude bastard.
Cat
Does that make 3 hour exams using pen and paper difficult or not?
As were “morning glories”.
’snice to have you home, Nabs.
By the way, isn’t it interesting how different mediums quickly assume names, adapting the language to their purposes? The ‘nouvelle’ entertainments of the 18th century became novels; the Fan Magazines or Fanzines of the early 20th century became ‘zines’…
But my favourite evolution has to be Web Log - Weblog - blog.
“Blog? What’s a blog? That’s a funny name!”
N:
Tsk, the tragedy of unexercised potential. I prescribe more wanking.
JG:
That’s a response, is it Shakespeare? Did you think it up yourself or did you Ctrl-C Ctrl-V it from an article you found in Google Scholar?
I’m surprised no one who was using computers to write stuff in the mid 90s has mentioned TEH HORRORS OF EARLY VERSIONS OF WORDPERFECT (yes, folks, Microsoft once did have a competitor for Office software). All those F keys. Evil! Particularly distressing for people who’d previously used the fantabulous program on Macs - when I was doing a bit of writing for Semper in 92, we used to have a Mac.
I fear that will have to be the case, given that Montblanc make nothing larger than this.
My first serious interaction with a computer was deleting AUTOEXEC.BAT from an XT clone running, I believe, MS-DOS 6, and from then on in I’ve been addicted to apocalypse scenarios and imaginations of the end of the world. Peak oil? That’s got nothing on botching the bootup of a pre-1995 computer.
Nowadays I run a Mac OSX desktop and a laptop with linux on it, and I’m constantly amazed by the slow pace of technology—gimme my DOS shell back, I say.
Thats a bit unfair. I aways found insects crawling across OHP transparencies added charming visual touch to any dull lecture.
My first computer was an Amstrad. I bet most of you haven’t even heard of them. They used DOS and possibly Word Perfect (it’s hard to remember).
At work we used IBMs and DBase and probably Word Perfect too. Making the move to Macs in 1988 was heavenly.
I had a horrible experience last year, when I submitted a lengthy essay, and my lecturer found a significant amount of plagiarism from the web in it (all essays are submitted to Turnitin). I was mortified. He did not take any action as he could tell that the “Plagiarised� stuff was not as good as my own.
Encroyable. I’ve never come across anyone who could take an instance where he was caught plagiarising and make out like it reflected glory on him. Don’t get all defensive John, this head-shaking is in (admittedly perverse) admiration. Or something.
1st ? = Commodore Vic -20
Helen: The web is an absolute boon to isolated carers and people with special interests or needs. I wish the naysayers would think of that sort of thing.
Yes. That’s been my experience too. When I first went online, I sought out people with the same interests as me. It didn’t take long for me to figure out I could also find people with the same needs as me, in different areas of my life. The online support groups I found have had an inestimably huge and positive impact. Ditto for the intellectual discussion groups.
Absolutely. It’s off-topic if only at a tangent, but in my early blogging days I wrote a post on the power of handwriting that you might like.
I did like it!
Funnily enough, a collection of recipes written out by my mother are also a precious keepsake of mine. Occasionally I come across one loose in a recipe book and it always gives me a pang - as a printed out email wouldn’t.
Still Helen, you gotta give JG credit for dropping his pants in public and announcing “at least the bigger bits are all mine.”
Suz! My family had an Amstrad. It was so cool.
(Yes, that was the name of a computer game…)
My dad bought it to write his uni assignments, but we mostly just enjoyed playing Jet Set Willy
I used an electric typewriter and carbon paper to do the copy of my essays that I was going to hand in. I wrote drafts by hand. I didn’t get a computer until my Honours year, and yes, it had Wordperfect - it was a hand-me-down. My first internet involvements were with the AUSTEN-L listserv and another smaller reading group led by Ellen Moody. I loved them both and Suz’s comments about being on lists with all these distinct personalities (who were mostly and overwhelmingly American) matched my experience exactly.
At my uni students still take lecture notes by hand, as I do myself. I have noticed the odd laptop in lecture theatres but it hasn’t really caught on. And I do get a few handwritten essays to assess every semester.
I can’t let that bizarre story about plagiarism pass without saying something. Yes, essays composed of material plagiarised from the web are typically far worse than what the student would have produced by themselves; this is because they don’t fit the topic, they’re incoherent patchworks, and they’ve been lifted off Wikipedia and the essay mill and crib notes sites. It’s not hard to be ‘better’ than those gobs of shite.
I had a student two years ago whose plagiarised ‘essay’ came about through the same sloppy cut and paste processes (and which she failed to pick up through giving her work even the most cursory proofreading) and she failed the whole semester, and the reason was inserted into her academic record. Once a student signs the statement which says they have documented all their sources, if they fail to do that, it is plagiarism regardless of whether they ‘meant it’ or not.
At my uni students still take lecture notes by hand, as I do myself.
Me too. I don’t even use the point-form lecture notes made available online in advance by some lecturers, to which you can add your own notes. I’ve read evidence which shows that note-taking is an incredible aid to memory and understanding - and I know that from doing it. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that note-taking on a laptop wouldn’t work in the same way for me.
Was it as good as “Leisure Suit Larry”? With the proto-ring tone version of “Staying Alive”?
Aargh! That takes me back, that does. Changing the ribbon. Dropping the golfball under the desk. Playing silly buggers with the whiteout. Rubbing carbon paper on your nipples. What? Don’t pretend you didn’t too.
I think at Griffith law students are encouraged to buy laptops for lectures and group work. I’ve got quite a few Arts/Law kids in my classes so I do see a bit of laptop note-taking. Of course, with Wi-Fi in the theatres, they could always be writing emails or posting to blogs or writing Myspace comments for all I know. Probably more productive intellectually than doodling…
What the ..? seriously why?
To duplicate them, of course.
Much classier than sitting on the photocopier.
Ahh..the low tech equivalent to the cameraphone down the top!
Though i still don’t think we had that craze at our school….
Strangely the majority of laptop note takers in my uni course are the part-timers so a bit older on the whole. And of course there’s me - a lot older.
Unlike Suz, I use the notes provided before hand and just mark up my additions. Works for me and because most exams are open book so having a coherent set of indexed notes is pretty important.
But having just gone through the exam thing, I’m reminded that I’ve lost the skills of writing legibly and in a linear coherent way. This can’t be a good thing.
I think it’s safe to say SC that PavCat nipped your query in the bud.
Thou were lucky lad. We had cyclostyle machines. Try inserting a piece of your anatomy into one of them.
On the other hand though, the cyclostyles (like our teachers) cheerfully and blatantly flaunted alcohol as a key rendering ingredient.
“Are you drunk Nabakov snr?”
“No sir, just helping Mrs Frost distribute the testest papapapers.”
“Really? Do you have any tonic water or olives?”
Laura
Well I topped the entire year, and the relevant prize is written on my academic record, so there you go.
Yes the purple ink that I got on those high school handouts from the Modern History teacher may just have seeped in somewhere…
Yes the Commodore Vic-20 SC. I don’t know if you bothered with the game that took 8 hours to program and then involved a square attacking a larger square with smaller squares, Put me off programming for life. I was impressed by the fact that if I bought a cassette drive I could play the game that was on a Stranglers album.
Leisure Suit Larry Nabs?
:Would you like a cigarette?
:Yes
:That’s not an answer.
(nice to have you back BTW)