Writing & Artificial Aids

Analogue Only

I’ve been thinking about the way education is delivered these days and how employers complain that so many school-leavers and graduates do not seem to be well equipped for the world of work in terms of literacy and numeracy, where are things going wrong I ask myself.

As I sit here at my typewriter without really thinking about the words, the spelling, or very much else, I was reminded of a couple of video clips I watched recently. The clips were of some younger people being exposed to typewriters in various situations and how they got on actually using them to write was interesting.

What struck me was just how incredibly slowly these people generated the text and how many simple and basic errors were made as they typed. It dawned on me that the problem was that these people were not having all their errors corrected for them in terms of grammar, capitalisation, spelling, spacing etc. - in essence they were unable to generate words accurately without the constant assistance of technology, it was frightening.

My observations made me wonder whether technology is in fact “covering up” yawning gaps in what people coming through the education system are actually learning, that real gaps in skills and knowledge are being hidden from view.

As I pondered on this I thought how interesting it would be to truly test the writing accuracy of a group of people by completely removing technological assistance. What would happen if we took 100 people and sat each of them down in front of a typewriter and asked them to produce 1000 words on say “My Life So Far”?

This would remove all technological assistance but the subject matter would allow total freedom of expression. The “piece” could be handwritten if preferred, or even typed using a simple text editor which incorporated NO spelling or grammatical assistance and which did not allow backspacing, errors would remain.

The scripts could then be marked for spelling and grammatical accuracy as well as artistic and literary merit. This study would provide a clear measure of the literary performance of the subjects, from brain to paper, without any external assistance whatsoever, the results would I think be, at the very least, interesting.

But, in the end, does it matter?