Students completed their second day of using typewriters in the classroom. Although it’s taking some effort trucking twenty manual typewriters to the classroom, it’s been worth it. On day two, we watched about forty minutes of California Typewriter, and I challenged students to draw connections between its meditation on typewriters to other seemingly obsolete forms of tech–cameras that use film, CD players, and so on. Not surprisingly, a few of them are collectors of vinyl and CDs, so that was an easy analogy to digest. The point, as always, was to think critically about what tool best fits which situation–and to question the presumption that the latest tech is the best tech, AND to question what we mean by the words progress and efficiency.

After the discussion, I displayed a list of prompts to inspire writing. The typewriters were disseminated, and students were off to the races. Their typing skills already seemed to improve since the first day. After another week of practice typing, we’ll begin assembling the first paper, a professional narrative paper in which they share their career dreams. They will handwrite their brainstorms and outlines, use typewriters for two intermediary drafts, and then move on to digital writing for the end product. (In the past, the middle drafts were normally handwritten.) Not only do these techniques lead to more thoughtful and detailed writing, but they counter temptations to use AI. In the end, I expect identifiable similarities between drafts. An utterly new final draft receives no credit. I grade the revision process. Is that time consuming? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

Unfortunately, the first day led to a broken typewriter. A student broke a key segment on a 1941 Royal Aristocrat. If anyone reading this has a parts machine, please consider responding to this post. The “J” segment broke in half (photos appear below). Otherwise, I’ll have to look for a parts machine on Shopgoodwill.com. I was pretty upset when I discovered the damage after class, but I can’t expect young writers to immediately understand the mechanics of a typewriter.

Some initial observations: 1) Students are so engaged by using typewriters that they seem to have forgotten that their smartphones exist. 2) Some are creatively playing around with indents, like an E.E. Cummings poem, enjoying the formatting of text. 3) Students seem to be letting go of the neurotic need for perfection (i.e. they make mistakes and move on). 4) They forget when class time ends.

Some exploratory thought: Today I listened to a podcast that featured a neuroscientist who discussed a recent discovery concerning why reading hardcopy books better supports memory formation than reading screen-based text. I think most of us have sensed that reading on paper leads to better thinking than reading from a screen. My assumption has always been that this is because mores senses are being utilized in the reading process–the feel of a page, the color of a book, etc. What I had not considered is spatial memory. According to the neuroscientist, the fact that words remain fixed on hardcopy text (meaning that a given word or passage is always in the same place on a specific page) leads to the ability to better recall content (what the content is and where to find it). Conversely, words on a digital text move as we scroll and manipulate the text. This undercuts reading comprehension and leads to shallow scanning. I think we all know what it is like to remember that a specific passage is somewhere early or late in a book, and it isn’t hard to find the passage again. That is more difficult to do with digital texts. (I would also suggest that reading from the same digital frame–your computer screen, your tablet, etc.–dulls sensory engagement.) All of this said, I wonder if typing on a typewriter also provides further benefits to memory, and therefore to creative and critical thinking, during the writing process. Certainly those who use typewriters can speak to an experience of increased thoughtfulness during composition, but is there something even deeper going on there? We know the world through our senses, through ALL of our senses. The more senses that are stimulated during a given experience, the more deep and memorable the experience. It’s a no-brainer really. Our brains record experience through a coordination of senses. The fewer senses used to index an experience, the less full and memorable the experience is. Sure, typing on a typewriter can lead to all kinds of typos and mistakes, but the intensity of memory in the act of writing focuses the mind and ultimately leads to deliberate and creative composition. Save the important but shallow and mundane act of final edits to the computer.

Warning: Images of typewriter accident appear below.