Advertisements

Write this down

A BETTER PENCIL:
Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution
By Dennis Baron
289 pp. Oxford University Press $24.95

Reviewed by Elizabeth McCullough

A friend emails me to share his observation that Twitter and instant messaging are undermining spelling and grammar. I read in an online newspaper that the Internet is destroying storytelling. Meanwhile, a woman in a San Francisco museum gallery painstakingly copies a Torah onto parchment letter by letter, using a turkey-feather quill. Everywhere, people are writing, using their technology of choice—pencil, pen, typewriter, computer—and a lot of this writing seems to consist of gripes about how new technologies are “destroying” the act of writing itself.

University of Illinois English professor Dennis Baron has taken note of this trend. In his new book, A Better Pencil, he says:

Each [new digital writing technology] brings with it complaints: email is destroying the language; instant messaging has taken the place of conversation; the World Wide Web is the source of lies and misinformation; and as for the blog, well, who would want to read the rants and ramblings of a total stranger?

This kind of attitude is nothing new. In A Better Pencil you can read that Henry David Thoreau complained about the cutting edge technology of his day: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Likewise, Socrates expressed his suspicions of the new-fangled invention of writing, fearing it would weaken memory. How do we know he said this? Because, as Baron points out, Plato wrote it down.

Baron’s review of the history of writing technologies is full of surprising tidbits made more surprising when you consider that they’re about something most of us do every day. For instance, while Thoreau was committing his deep thoughts to his notebook, he was also working on developing better products for his family’s pencil factory. We don’t normally think of pencils as “writing technology,” but the simple pencil has a rich enough history to merit its own book (Henry Petroski’s The Pencil). Pencils, Baron tells us, started out as chunks of graphite used to mark sheep. Wooden holders for the graphite made it less messy and more convenient to use. Pencil technology grew more and more refined, and methods of manufacture became closely guarded secrets. Eventually, someone thought to attach an eraser to the end of a pencil. What a great idea, no? No, said the teachers of the day—erasers on pencils would only encourage hasty errors. Today, as Baron points out, an eraser is so integral to the act of writing with a pencil that it’s common for people to throw away a pencil once its eraser is worn out.

“Critics,” Baron writes, “attack the newest technologies of writing...as impersonal, mechanical, intellectually destructive, and socially disruptive.” In the case of the printing press, or pencils, or typewriters, this attitude seems risible and even bizarre. And yet we—those of us over 40, anyway—still insist that the old ways were the good ways, that keyboarding is ruining handwriting, that nothing that can be Twittered in 140 characters or less is worth saying in the first place.

Baron probes this nostalgia and finds that there never was a Golden Age of writing. As a class exercise, he has his students form modeling clay into tablets and incise a selected passage on them using a stylus. The exercise demonstrates abundantly why no one longs for the good old days of cuneiform. Likewise, few people prefer a goose feather to a ballpoint, or a manual typewriter to a Selectric. For that matter, hardly anyone still uses Selectrics—most writers seem to have adopted word processing, if grudgingly. Some have gone further—novelist Richard Powers, for instance, is well known for dictating his books directly into a computer using voice-recognition software. Afterwards, he edits the text on a touch-screen with a special tool called...a stylus.

It seems as though no writing technology ever completely disappears. We entrust the treasured words of our Founders to letters chiseled in marble. We mark our burial sites with our names and birth and death dates engraved in stone. The documents that commemorate the most significant moments of our lives are still validated with seals and signatures, a tradition that goes back hundreds of years to a time when printed documents were considered far more untrustworthy than a steady gaze and a firm handshake. A Better Pencil explores all these paradoxes and developments with a light touch of humor and infectious intellectual curiosity.

Writing and writing technology are broad subjects, too broad for one book to do them justice (Remember, there’s a whole book out there just about pencils). Nevertheless, I’d have liked to have read more about topics only lightly touched on, such as handwriting, the alphabet as technology, the development of the pen, and cultural phenomena such as samizdat. But as Baron points out, I can always turn for more information to one of the newest writing technologies to come out of what he calls “the emerging genre of group-authored reference works.” You may know it by another name: Wikipedia.

---

Elizabeth McCullough is a freelance writer living in beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband and two children. Visit her at http://cvillewords.com.

Copyright © 2009 by Internet Review of Books
Webdesign by Jasper van der Meer webdesignstudio | XHTML