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« Pikachu des profondeurs, and more | Main | Putting endnotes in their place » Monday, May 7, 2007Consider the typewriterJosh's excellent review of "The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting," about the influence of typewriters on lives lived in the age when they were common, occasioned some thoughts. I often wonder about what effect the broad switch from typewriters to computers might have had on the way we write. Consider first the advent of e-mail. It allows writers to roam widely and submit their articles -- even entire book manuscripts -- instantly. This is obviously of great use to journalists when it comes to breaking news. Not to mention lawyers, doctors, professors, and everybody else reading Brainiac. I know the fax machine came first, but man, let's get rid of those already. (Until searching and extracting text from a PDF becomes better than a hit-or-miss proposition, though, I guess we're stuck.) E-mail saves typesetters -- I mean Quark and PageMaker magicians -- the task of retyping the whole darn text when it arrives. Also, the infinite editability of a word-processed document is a great feature. Cutting and pasting is a lot easier without scissors and glue. But perhaps it's too easy. Maybe we should all write first and ask questions later. And pay some price for indulging our every whim. Joyce Carol Oates and Larry McMurtry both still use typewriters, and it's working out okay for them. Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:17 PM
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