"A Better Pencil" and Style

Dennis Barron explores the development of writing tools. As someone who has been involved in publishing since 1976, I found it fascinating to see my personal history appear in his book, A Better Pencil.
Baron shows how pencil writing was supplemented but never surpassed by typewriting. For many years, I used pencils and typewriters side by side. I chose to write personal letters, invitations to parties, and condolence letters by hand; I used an electric typewriter to prepare book manuscripts and transcriptions of the dictation of my boss, the editor of U.S. News & World Report (a writer who was scared of all technology except his dictation machine and ancient manual typewriter). All of my work was one-of-a-kind; my less fortunate colleagues struggled to format mag card Selectrics to mindlessly produce form letters. We had “a better pencil” with automated typewriters, but few used them. At least mag card typists didn’t have to hit ENTER at the end of each line.

I earned my way through grad school by typing 60 words per minute with two errors. I had to type letters at least three times each to produce an error-free product. It took me 18 tries to type one letter addressed simply to “The White House, Washington, D.C.” You couldn’t send the President a letter with Wite-Out on it.

As typewriters hung on, calculators had begun to replace the slide rule/pencil calculations that we had done through high school. They were definitely better than pencils but were too expensive for me to buy even as an MBA student. I was a whiz with a pencil and a financial table. Excel, the best pencil of all, was still in the future.

I finished my MBA and found a job at a computer retailer, Entre Computer Systems. In 1982, I was sitting pretty with my $10,000 IBM PC, but at night, my eyes would burn and I would lay in bed with a washcloth to sooth the eyestrain from the terrible screen of this computer. I hated memorizing formatting codes, and I also hated the slow buffers that made keyboarding laborious. Colleagues edited nonstop simply because they could. I distinctly remember one colleague endlessly looping 26 drafts of an annual report across my desk. PCs didn’t yet replace pencils as we didn’t know how to use them efficiently.

We couldn’t get much use out of PCs until the development of email. Now emails are ubiquitous, even for personal letters and even, horrifyingly, often for sympathy notes. Definitely a more efficient pencil, albeit sometimes an ineffective one as it allowed us to use technology to avoid personal contact. Not only personal contact, but personalized style--the choice of color schemes and tactile images—took a back seat. When PCs stopped crashing, managers and writers couldn’t exist without them.

Pencils finally disappeared out of my purse as the iTouch arrived. I was no longer humiliated hunting for a piece of paper when my electronic address book was at hand. Like the Blackberry, iPhones with their tiny keyboards suit texting colleagues who use pre-keyed replies and forget that we capitalize “I” in our language. One could spend all day playing with digital tools: pens that record and digitize motions are sold next to tablet computers that generate prose; although I’ve never actually touched either of these, they may change our language in ways unknown.

Our Online Learning Systems change education as facilitated tutorials replace professors’ lectures. The Internet crowd-sources term paper research; ghost writers in Pakistan prepare term papers for my students who are too busy facebooking to write their own essays; British spellings tell the tale. All of these tools are designed to feed the omnivorous screen that devours many of our waking hours.

The style of our writing and the tools we use are changing rapidly, too rapidly for some. I still have students who hit ENTER at the end of each line in WORD. When I see a page of green squiggly lines, I know I’ve found another technophobe. I cannot imagine how long it takes keyboarders to line up all those sentences when they add a word to a long paragraph.

For my project this term, I’d like to study how to present style in English education. Specifically, I’d like to look at the best technological tools and pedagogical approaches for teaching the principles of style to students who rarely read, those who engage more fully with presentations than with style manuals. I’d like to study some innovative ways of engaging students in communications classes. I’d like to figure out how best to teach the articulate Rip Van Winkle middle-agers now entering college who still hit ENTER at the end of each line, and I’d like to learn how best to teach clear and graceful writing to the technowhizzes whose writing needs stylistic help.

Reference
Baron, D. (2009). A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.