Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by
skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the
point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing
process, to destroying the English language itself.
A Better Pencil puts our complex, still-evolving hate-love
relationship with computers and the internet into perspective,
describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and
writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what
came before. The book explores our use of computers as writing
tools in light of the history of communication technology, a
history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing
technologies--not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils,
and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing
implements--and even writing itself--were greeted at first with
anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost
spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the
typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of
handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks
that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by
woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by
writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words,
until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also
explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the
instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages
like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like
Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube.
Here then is a fascinating history of our tangled dealings with a
wide range of writing instruments, from ancient papyrus to the
modern laptop. With dozens of illustrations and many colorful
anecdotes, the book will enthrall anyone interested in language,
literacy, or writing.
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