The Pissed Off Professor

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years I’ve taught is the declining ability/desire of students to plan, draft, write, and edit their work.

I could take the easy road and blame this on laziness, and while I believe this to be partially true, I don’t think it’s the real reason for this phenomenon.

The computer is to blame for this.

When I was a beginning writing student, I had paper and pencils. The act of writing a composition consisted of working on sheets of paper, jotting down one’s ideas, using arrows and asterisks and numerous revisions to get the work to a point that it was safe to write a final copy—you know, the one the teacher would grade for content and neatness.

Later, when my mother brought her old typewriter home from the office, the process was similar; however, the final copy was painstakingly hunt-n-peck typed, and inevitably, one or more pages would need to be retyped after a missed key or a missed mark of punctuation or the realization that the bottom line of the text was below the one-inch margin on the page. After one or two miscues, a person learned how to focus on the task at hand.

After liquid white-out came to be, making an error was not lethal, but it was still rough: moving the bad text up, whiting the mistake out, and moving the text back down worked only some of the time. With the advent of the electric, self-correcting typewriter—a machine that could miraculously backspace, eradicate an error, and retype the correct word or phrase—life became much easier.

But the process of writing still had to be undertaken. One had to lay plans before typing. No student in her right mind would sit down at a typewriter, think to herself that she’s got four hours to get her paper done, and begin banging away on the keyboard.

Today, that’s the way students write. I know. I’ve asked the question, and the honest ones have told me as much. Before the computer, this simply wasn’t possible—at least not to the same degree.

The idea of planning and drafting a thing before typing it makes no sense in the heads of today’s students. It’s viewed as a ludicrous waste of time.

Why would I work on paper when I can work on my laptop? If I don’t like something, I just select it, hit “delete,” and move forward.

I don’t need to worry about where things go: that’s what copy and paste is for.

All I need to do is type out what comes into my head, and I’ll spell check it, grammar check it, and revise it later.

And who can blame them? They’ve grown up with computers.

They have no idea that writing and typing are not the same things.

When I learned to write, typing was the thing one did when everything was perfect. It’s what made all that hard work look good. It was the signal that a process had come to an end.

Today, using a computer (i.e. typing) is the starting point. It is the means to perfection; the place that houses the grammar checker and the dictionary and the internet. The work produced looks good from the moment it begins, and we all know the connection between looking good and feeling good.

Video may not have killed the radio star, but the computer has killed the process of writing for many students, and I see only one way to turn back this particular clock: if it were up to me, students would not be allowed to use a computer to generate compositions until they were in graduate school. They would be forced to begin their work on paper, finalize it, and type it on a typewriter that lacked a correction tape.

I guarantee this change would result in a rediscovery of the process of writing without any input from anyone: it would be the result of necessity as it was for many of us who made do in the dark ages—the time before computers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under College, Comparison/Contrast, Education, Essay, Students, Teaching, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.