Quote: Writing faster, easier, and more with computers (Berry)
February 27th, 2006 | Published in Education, Quotes, Technology, Writing | 1 Comment
A computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can’t get from other humans; a computer will help you write faster, easier, and more. For a while, it seemed to me that every university professor I met told me this. Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily, and too much. I would like to be a better writer, and for that I need help from other humans, not a machine.
—Wendell Berry, “Feminism, The Body, and the Machine” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 74
March 1st, 2006 at 4:56 pm (#)
It looks like there is a misunderstanding in this text : the author is doing quite a lot to refute a reasoning which is not even correct.
Of course our standards are not just “to write faster, easier, and more”; that’s quite obvious. But using a computer, for a writer, is far from being just a matter of speed & quanity. Many people find that writing in Word processor gives you a kind of freedom of expression which you could not enjoy writing by pencil. It involves another vision of text – you can split and extend, change, cut, paste, revert to a previous version or just delete the whole thing altogether more easily, and evaluation of the text is more immediate.
That’s different from paper-and-pencil method — not because it is faster, but because it makes you pay more attention to the content, as you are no longer concentrated on the physical process of writing.