🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <dek-160694092253@mag04.gazette.jhu.edu>,
Dale Keiger <dek@resource.ca.jhu.edu> wrote:
>Jesus Christ, stop bitching and write. Your teacher might want to force you
>to crawl word by word over your composition, which is what you ought to be
>doing anyway. Said teacher might be a lot smarter than you think, and
>probably is. If you think this is hardship, you're never going to last as a
>writer anyway.
>-- 
>Dale Keiger
>dek@resource.ca.jhu.edu

This is the second response like this I've seen.  I ignored the first,
thinking perhaps it was just a fluke, but it seems I was wrong.

Is it a hardship to be forced to handwrite papers?  Perhaps, perhaps
not.  But it would certainly be an inconvenience, were someone to try
to require it of me.  A word processor or screen editor actually helps
me think and organize my thoughts.  Were I to be forced to handwrite
everything, things that would have been changed were I using an editor
would not, simply because I caught them on the second or third draft,
and I wasn't going to handwrite the whole thing again because suddenly
I thought of a somewhat better way to word that paragraph on the first
page.

With an editor, making changes is easy.  I write the document, often making
changes to preceding paragraphs as I go along.  I read and edit the first
draft, making still more changes.  Then I print, and sit with a pencil
in hand and edit again.  Then those edits go into the document.  Then
I do to onscreen reading and editing again, and print another draft.
Sometimes that draft is finished quality, sometimes not.  If not, I 
repeat the last couple of steps again.  And again, and again, until I'm
satisfied.

How would that look with a handwritten document?  Funney you should ask.
I came across a document that I had hand-written after I was used to
comuters, but before I owned one.  It was a copy of the first draft.  I
had circled paragraphs to move, with arrows where to move them, substituted
words, etc.  Just like in an editor.  So what's the difference?  I happen
to know that the second draft was the final draft.  No further editing
went on.  Would it have been better had I had an editor and was able to
easily write third and fourth drafts?  Probably.

All in all, I think that it's silly to be forced to turn in handwritten
assigments.  It would not cause me to be more creative, but less.  It
would not cause me to create better papers, but worse.  And for a teacher
to tell me I'm more creative when hand writing a paper is to say she
doesn't know me.

To be honest, I suspect that the teacher is somewhat computerphobic, if
I may be allowed to use that non-word.  I suspect she has had little
real exposure to computers, and has little idea what kind of writing 
tool they can be.  This might be a reasonable request if this was
a class on grammer, but one hopes that this was learned in high school,
and that this class is on learning the basics of writing.

Sean.

---
Sean L. Gilley
sean.l.gilley@att.com
614 860 9053 (h), 614 860 5743 (w)