Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
A colleague dug through old material from college and shared with me a couple of pages of a text distributed to Yale students in the mid-1990s. The full text is titled “Writing Prose,” and in evolving forms it was produced by the “Committee on Expository Writing” at Yale beginning in the mid-1970s. One of its original 1970s authors was one of my freshman English professors, Jefferson (Jeff) Hunter, who later left Yale and taught at Smith College.
The material that I’ve quoted below appears at the very end of a 60-page booklet, likely added either as part of a mid-1990s revision or a late-1980s revision. The distinction doesn’t matter. What strikes me, and what motivates me to share the quotations, are parallels between the faculty’s characterization of “writing with a word processor” then and teachers’ anxieties today about students producing written work via Generative AI.
More and more Yale students, like writers everywhere, are turning to the computer and its word processing software for all stages of the writing process. There are many excellent reasons to this. Word processing eliminates or streamlines many of the routine tasks involved in writing, allowing you to work faster. With a word processor, you no longer need to retype your entire draft in order to change it, so that you are much less likely to feel daunted by the task of revising. The computer gives you many sophisticated tools for manipulating your prose, such as block moves, text searches, global replacements, and automatic footnotes. Word processing replaces the old notion of discrete drats with a continuous cycle of reconsideration and refinement, making it easier to work toward more and more polished prose. In the end, your finished copy will often look neater than a text written or typed by hand, especially if you use a spelling checker to catch errors. All of these capabilities make the word processor an immensely powerful and attractive tool, so much so that many writers would not dream or working without one. If you think of the word processor merely as a computerized typewriter, you are selling the technology short.
Many teachers nonetheless complain that there is no sharp difference in quality between papers written on word processors and those done by hand or on a typewriter. Indeed, some claim that there has been a significant deterioration [italics in original] in the quality of manuscripts because students write so quickly on the computer that they become careless about the elementary tasks of rereading and proofreading prose. Word processing may help you organize and refine your ideas, but the invention, analysis, and persuasion on which all good writing depends must still come from you. The word processor may not be simply a high-tech typewriter, but neither is it an artificial intelligence. The quality of your prose - whether measured in terms of the insight of your ideas or the accuracy of your spelling and punctuation - is your responsibility.
Taking control of the word processor so that you can use it as effectively as possible requires that you recognize the new problems it can introduce into your prose. The greater sped of computer composition, for instance, can lead to sloppiness or wordiness: as essays become longer, they often lose their organizational clarity or focus. Relocating passages in block moves (“cutting and pasting”) often introduces errors of parallelism or logical sequence. Computer revision all too frequently produces noun-verb or other word combinations that no longer agree with one another. Because you do not retype an entire sentence when you change it on the computer, a sentence such as “The typical student does not proofread carefully enough” can easily become “Too many Yale students does not proofread carefully enough.” [Bold in original.] No spelling checker can identify such errors, so the only way to guard against them is to slow down and reread everything you revise, preferably out loud. Your ear will hear errors that your eye has great trouble seeing on the computer screen.
Perhaps the most serious pitfall of word processing lies in the fact that only a small part of one’s text - far less than a conventional page - is visible at any given time. The computer screen gives writers the compositional equivalent of tunnel vision, causing them to forget statements they may already have made and making it difficult for them to keep track of the larger framework in which individual paragraphs are embedded. Although word processing is in many ways preferable to older forms of writing, the constraints of the display screen are a substantial drawback. For this reason, you should print out your word processor file at regular intervals [italics in original] in order to see it whole. At the very least, produce one complete printed draft for revision and correction before you turn in any essay.
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In sum, writing on a word processor means writing in a powerful new way, but the goal for your final product remains the same: clear, readable prose that will convey your ideas to your reader in an engaging and understandable way. Keep that goal foremost in your mind at all times, and you will find that your prose — whether written with a computer or a quill pen — will gain a grace and clarity that will do honor to yourself and your audience alike.
The 1980s and 1990s limits of the vision animating that text are pretty obvious, although in a lot of respects the substantive guidance does not merely reflect a well-intentioned New Yorker-ish 20th century ideology (I like to imagine that the authors of the text were influenced by the campus presence of William Zinsser, of “On Writing Well”). A lot of the substance here is still quite useful, and not only to student writers.
Here is why. It’s where I enter the story, and how:
I grew up in a family of writers. Journalists, newshounds of the mid-century old school, rather than novels or poets or playwrights. Between the training I received at home and guidance from middle school English teachers, by the time I entered high school my prose had advanced well beyond an introductory level, even if I had a long way to go. (For more autobiographical context, read the first few pages of this law journal article.)
In the ninth grade, I learned to type. I was told to take my school’s typing class, which I did, and for a Christmas present (or perhaps a birthday present), I was given a manual typewriter. It’s the machine pictured above, which I still own. An Olympia SM9, which at least one typewriter maven on social media has called “possibly the best-engineered typewriter ever made,” though until I read that sentence it had never occurred to me to wonder about the relative merits of my machine. (The serial number of my machine marks it as a contemporary of this one.) Back in the mid-1970s, on that machine and the manuals at school I learned to bang out text at something close to 50 words per minute, which was a pretty respectable clip.
Every report, essay, and research paper that I produced in high school was typed up on that machine. Every paper and project that I produced in college was typed up on that machine. Every exam I took in law school was written on that machine. Back in the day - the 1980s and long before - it was common for law schools to give students the option of taking exams in separate “typing rooms,” usually occupied by a tiny handful of students rather than hand-writing exams in blue books, surrounded by a large cohort of test-takers.
I lugged all 20 pounds of my Olympia SM9 to the San Jose Convention Center during the late Summer of 1987 in order to write the bar exam over those three long days. The “typing room” for the bar exam featured more than a tiny handful of students, but by then I was accustomed to thinking and writing amid the din of typewriter keys hitting platens. Some test-takers brought electric typewriters, but they tended to be even heavier than my Olympia. The bar examiners prohibited using any machine that contained even the slightest hint of “computer memory.” Mine passed pre-test inspection with flying colors.
Along the way, the volume of material that I produced, together with my family’s nudging me toward journalism and some internship time spent in newsrooms, meant that I got to be reasonably proficient at composing at a keyboard. In the Spring of 1979, the annual “Journalism Education Association” (JEA, now JEA/NSPA) convention was held at a hotel in San Jose, and among the “student journalist” competitions was a contest to write a news story immediately following a pretend news conference. The Olympia and I listened to the speaker and to the questions and answers that followed, and immediately afterward I wrote up a story. I won a trophy.
All of which is to say that when I encountered “word processing software” for the first time, at law school during the mid-1980s, I was reasonably self-aware as to what STS scholars (but, understandably, not the Yale Committee on Expository Writing) would call its “affordances,” relative to the “affordances” of a typewriter or a quill pen.
I was not and am not as self-aware or as enthusiastic about comparative writing/thinking/technology intersections as, say, fountain-pen-using Neal Stephenson, but even forty years ago I recognized that there is no such thing as a “pure” baseline when it comes to thinking and writing without bias or contamination or influence of the “tools” that we use to compose. The McLuhan-esque adage has always been true in my case: we make our tools, and they make us.
The physical effort involved in using a manual typewriter, and the loud clacking of the typewriter keys, enforced a patience and a discipline that I have always found useful when writing and thinking, even if I boxed up my typewriter long ago in favor of computer keyboards and mice. (I am reminded of film, as I often am. In the movie “Finding Forrester” (2000), Sean Connery’s character William Forrester, a reclusive Salinger-esque writer, yells at his student protege: ““Punch the keys, for God’s sake!”) The Yale Committee clearly got and gets that part right: writing assistants, whether they are “word processors,” or “Clippy” from Microsoft,” or a Generative AI model, are - by design - intended to eliminate much of the “friction,” intellectual, emotional, and mechanical, that many have found, for generations, to be an essential ingredient in great writing. Even good writing.
Which is, in a way, also the thing that the Yale passage above gets wrong, if understandably so. The machine is, in itself, neither the problem nor the solution.
It’s the friction. If I call “teaching writing” a problem of “sociotechnical” design - blending ease and struggle, mechanical as well as cognitive and metaphorical - rather than a question of “when word processors are good” and “when word processors are bad,” then I stay on the right (write?) track with my own students. It is too easy, I think, to dismiss the Yale Committee’s guidance under the guise of treating anxiety over word processors as silly. Word processors, we believe, didn’t make the world worse.
Did they?
Thanks for sticking with me.