My thoughts on A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron
I'm taking a tutorial called "Topics in Compositions Studies: Multimodality and Essayistic Literacy," and for that tutorial, I am going to be keeping a reading blog. Said reading blog will simply be an appendage of/to this blahg, and will be labeled "CompStud" (oh ha ha). However, I do not want this new appendage to be freakish and strange to the blahg as a whole; therefore, I will be attempting both to comment on my reading in an intelligent and germane-to-the-tutorial sort of way, but also to retain the general blahginess, the feeling I've worked now for 5 years to create.
What is that feeling I've worked to create here? Is it one of consistency of tone. No, not really. Is it, this blog, more like some sort of spontaneous collage/bricolage thing? Yes, probably. So why the preceding preamble/apology? Because I can. And because I had to explain the "CompStud" joke. Har. Dee. Har.
First up: A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron
I read this book very quickly. I will likely read the next book for this tutorial very quickly. In fact, most of the reading I do these days, especially reading for classes, is done quickly. I skim, I skip, I jump around. I try to take notes and/or remember what I've read so that I might talk about it intelligently in class (or on a blog), but I find this style of reading (a style most academics must adopt in order to both read everything they must read and have a life outside of reading) to be a kind of cheating at worst, and a disappointment at best. It's not really reading. I don't know what it is, and I now feel as though I'm giving away some sort of well-guarded, academic secret.
The thing is, though, that Baron's book is about how each new leap forward in the technology of writing (hell, even the technology of writing itself) has been met with resistance. (This should come as no surprise; half of this country thinks that "progress" is a dirty word (and I would imagine those same people still tell the old "what's the opposite of congress" joke (only the other way around, with the punchline in the right place)).) For instance, people said, "This writing thing will destroy our memories!" Then people said, "This pencil thing, since the marks it makes are able to be erased, will destroy all permanence and authenticity!" And then people said, "This kooky typewriter contraption will mechanize our thoughts and destroy poetry (or something)!" And, of course, now people are saying, "ZOMG!!!1!!eleventy!!! I i5 in UR My5p4c3, h4xx0ring UR bl0g!!!" or basically the same thing they've said about everything else, and yet . . .
And yet, writing still happens. And good writing still happens.
But who, generally, are these doomsayers? Probably, they're people like me who cringe every time they see a plural word adorned with a useless apostrophe. They're writers and people who teach writing (probably especially people who teach writing). They are the very people who cheat at reading.
Yes.
Okay, that isn't exactly fair. Everyone cheats at reading. I used to work for Kinko's. We would put up large signs directing customers this way or that, explaining how to use the computer stations, or the self-serve copiers. These were big signs. We put them in places where people would have to walk around them to get where they were going. And still, every day (please note the proper use of the temporal adjective and noun there) people would ask me how to do the things the signs told them, and then get huffy when I pointed them to the signs.
And how many times have you sent someone an email, which was full of useful information, only to have them later ask you for the same information because they didn't read the whole email? In my experience, most people willingly admit to this.
Dennis Baron's book suffers from many things: its information about writing in the digital age is woefully out of date despite its publication date (and this just bolsters the argument that traditional publishing simply can't keep up, and should, in some cases, keep out); it reads as though it was written by a boomer for other boomers who are frightened of computers (the lame, cutesy, out-of-date jokes do nothing to help this); and lastly, it doesn't really explore how reading has changed and whether or not these technological advances are a response to those changes or if they have caused them.
A brief look at how the use of text in advertising has changed over the last century should cause anyone to question the so-called illegitimacy of txtng as a form of writing.