Unit 1 Portfolio

Source 1: Pencils To Pixels [Book Chapter]

lthough we accessed Baron's Pencils to Pixels through a University's English department website, the text is in a rather familiar and traditional format; a book chapter. This in and of itself is interesting because it shows how traditional written formats have been adapted to meet the demand of the digital age. For the purposes of having a class read this chapter the digital format is much more convenient and eco-friendly, but does lack the hands on connection that reading on paper and being able to highlight and annotate in the margins provides. The formatting of the digital text also leaves something to be desired. Clearly a university English department isn’t going to have the beautiful interface of modern digital publications that arose during the internet age. However, text that stretches all the way across the screen with no margins and appears to have multiple fonts and sizes mixed in throughout the transcript is less than user friendly. In the age of enhanced PDFs that allow the reader to digitally highlight and annotate, this chapter also falls short.

The timeframe in which this text was written is also an important consideration. The website where we accessed Pencils to Pixels does not indicate a publication date but based on some of the references to the “World Wide Web” and the fact that every cited source is from before the year 2000 I think it is safe to assume that it is at least 15 years old. Interestingly enough, the overall message of Pencils to Pixels still rings true today even after developments in writing and communications technology. AI and machine learning spell checkers such as Grammarly have come along an made Word’s spell check look like child’s play and social media has revolutionized how people communicate in written form.

The chapter’s conclusion mentions that, at the time of writing, we still knew very little about house people used computers to read and write. This is still true to a large extent today due to the rapid pace of innovation and development in this space. The Twitter- forced move to 140 characters and then subsequently to 280 has undoubtedly created an entirely new classification of written communication but the ultimate impact is still unclear.

Source 2: How Technology Helped a Writer Come Out As Dyslexic [Video from tech magazine]

 Lisa Wood Shapiro has written multiple books, regularly contributes to highly regarded

publications such as Wired and Vogue and does it all as a dyslexic. In the past this story would

have been impossible. We were always taught the importance of spelling in elementary school

and high profile competitions such as the Scripps National Spelling Bee place a huge amount of

attention and emphasis on spelling. However, Shapiro has been able to go her entire career as a

professional writer with hardly anyone, even her editors and colleagues, knowing of her

dyslexia.         

Wood used Wired, a famous technology magazine as her platform to “come out” as

dyslexic. A highly produced 7-minute video was accompanied by a lengthy article that dove in depth into several of the physiological phenomenon that accompanied Shapiro’s dyslexia. The article provided a deeper look into several of the medical issues mentioned in the video as well as more detail on Shapiro’s career as a writer but the video, with its snazzy on screen graphics of the way Shapiro processed words and the 6 different ways she thought “maintenance” could be spelled.

            Near the end of the video, Shapiro mentions that while Word and the little red squiggly under a misspelled word had helped make her career possible, Grammarly and its new AI spell check capabilities had made her life infinitely easier as it was able to predict what she meant even through some of her most egregious butcheries of words. When Shapiro mentioned Grammarly it almost seemed as if it was sponsored content but as Wired is a tech publication and Grammarly is part of the tech of writing, it seemed a natural fit after some consideration. At the end of the video, Shapiro discusses where the line should be drawn when it comes to AI writing. Advanced spell checking and even correcting contractions or adding punctuation is fine, but once a computer program begins to be able to simulate particular tones or levels of formality it is time to reconsider. To her, writing is the art of telling a story in the proper tone and spell checkers, even advanced ones like Grammarly, are just the tools that make it possible.

Source 3: Smartphones Killed Handwriting. Let’s Bring It Back. [Article in the Wall Street Journal]

This is an article that personally resonated with me because I have experimented with digital writing tools such as the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and apps such as Notability but have found them awkward and unnatural despite their fancy design and “just like pen and paper” marketing messages. 

This source also pairs a video with an article but in this case is the article that takes center stage and the video simply serves a supplementary material to demonstrate some of the technology that the writer is talking about. The author, David Pierce, explains that he has recently been taking good ole’ pen and paper with him to his meetings rather than his laptop to increase his focus and engagement and prevent distractions. He then goes through some of the pros and cons of writing by hand before settling on the point that anything written by hand in a notebook is simply in that one location forever and not accessible anywhere else or in any other medium. This spurs Pierce to go through the numerous digital tools currently available for taking notes such as tablets and laptops with highly precise styluses, handwriting specific devices that mimic the look and feel of a piece of paper, even smartpens that transmit notes written on regular paper to an app to be stored digitally. I have tried several of these technologies myself and came to the same conclusion that Pierce did, although the ideas are clever, they fall short in making the experience of handwriting in a digital environment feel natural and seamless.

The last section of the article is Pierce offering his solution to the problem but to me it was underwhelming and barely better than the options I had tried. He said Rocketbook, a resuable notebook that can be wiped clean with a wet cloth. However, in order to get your notes into the digital environment, you need to scan them using the Rocketbook app. Addmittedly, the system of dots that allow the user to have their note automatically added to Dropbox or Evernote or even emailed to a predetermined location are pretty nifty, but the process of having to pull out your phone and take pictures of every page of notes seems clunky and annoying.

The most insightful piece of the article is the discussion at the end of how handwriting is going to be re-introduced into the professional and academic worlds and how tech hardware producers are going to facilitate this.

Source 4: The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools

[Pew Research Center study published online]

This study surveyed and conducted focus groups with 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers and explored the ways that digital technology is affecting writing in the classroom.

The results of the study were not shocking or groundbreaking by any means, but did do a good job of examining the issue from the point of view of professional instructors. Overall the survey found that AP and NWP teachers saw digital writing formats as beneficial in the sense that they greatly enhance students’ ability to share and collaborate but also harmful because they make informal writing more normalized and also blur the lines of plagiarism and fair use. As a result, many teachers (88%) “spend class time ‘discussing with students the concepts of citation and plagiarism’ ” and 75% “spend class time ‘ discussing with students the concepts of fair use and copyright’ .” Ironically, I am dealing with this very same issue as I create this blog. I have been well trained in multiple citation formats but the formality of academic citations isn’t appropriate for a blog just as hyperlinking isn’t appropriate for a formal paper. Learning how sufficiently credit the source of information in a way that is consistent with the medium you are writing in is definitely a learned skill and something that I will be practicing throughout the course of this semester.

Although a Pew Research Center article seems as if it would be presented in a hyper-formal format that sacrifices readability in order to stick with academic convention, this article is actually very easy to pick through and find specific information. Each main point is bolded and separated into its own paragraph and the supporting statistics and text are placed below. The paragraphs themselves are also short and the format is reminiscent of an article in an online news publication. This adaptation of a formal source to be more accessible to the common reader is perhaps, itself, evidence of the impact that digital technology is having on writing.