“Our writing instruments also have an effect on our thoughts.” Nietzsche wrote, or more precisely, wrote this sentence on a Malling-Hansen writing ball, a wondrous, strange device that appears slightly like a Koosh ball solid from brass and studded with typewriter keys . Pressing a key pushed a lever with the writing facing down onto the paper, which was held in place within the lower abdomen.
It is thought that Nietzsche acquired the writing ball to compensate for his failing eyesight. With the assistance of his touch, he wrote concise, aphoristic formulations, similar to this often-quoted saying. Our writing instruments, he suggested, should not just tools or devices for expressing ideas; They actively shape the boundaries and scope of what we’ve got to say. Not only will we write in another way with a fountain pen than with a coloured pencil because every one feels different in our hands, we also write (and think) in another way.
But what can writing instruments and typewriters really tell us about writing? I just published my book “Track Changes” As I delved into the literary history of word processing, I noticed that questions like these were often on my mind. Every interviewer I spoke to… desired to understand how computers had modified literary style. Sometimes they meant style for a single creator; sometimes they looked as if it would want it speak out in regards to the literary establishment (whatever that’s) in its entirety.
Style is at the identical time something tangible – made up of individual words and phrases, with the tutorial specialization of Stylometry is devoted to his study – and is elusive, tied to a author's “voice” or the unique “feel” of his prose. Undoubtedly, this is the reason it fascinates us and why it’s so vital for us to know what computers do with it. And yet I believe the query is misplaced.
Word processing has modified the sport
We know loads about how computers have modified the character of literary writing: obviously revision became easier, and in actual fact the excellence between revision and composition began to vanish entirely. (There is now special writing instruments that force you to work through a draft without stopping to revise.)
Matthew Kirschenbaum, CC BY-ND
We also know that word processors found their way into the plot and setting, just as typewriters did in novels like William S. Burroughs. “Naked Lunch” or Stephen King's “Misery.”
And we all know that the circumstances of literary production have modified: As I described in my book, in 1983, John Updike wrote a message on his typewriter by which he fired his secretary because he had just purchased a word processor. A yr later, Primo Levi wrote to an English friend that he “in danger of becoming a Mac bore.” When she wrote back that it was just a “clever new typewriter,” he replied, “It's much more than that!” It's a memory prosthesis, an archive, an unprotesting secretary, a new game every day and a Designer, as you can see in the attached millipede picture.”
But none of those are real style observations.
Style is the sum of many alternative influences – after all the instrument with which the creator writes, but in addition market trends and editorial guidelines, what an creator is reading that week, his emotional state and rather more. (Nietzsche himself had chosen the word in its original German – “thoughts” – fairly than something as special as style.)
In fact, two researchers recently tried to see if literary style may very well be measured using this whether authors have passed through an MFA program or not, one other deterministic variable that seems easy to isolate. They failed.
Not the style, however the meaning of the text
When we sit at a typewriter, we’re at all times in the current moment because the carriage rolls forward character by character, line by line. In contrast, word processing allowed authors to understand a manuscript as an entire, as a gestalt. The entire manuscript was immediately available via search functions. Entire passages may very well be moved around and chapters or sections rearranged. The text field became fluid and malleable, a potentially infinite expanse or not less than limited only by the pc's ever-expanding memory.
The result was a brand new sort of control over the writing space, a sentiment shared by the technology's early adopters, who were otherwise as different from each other because the National Book Award winner Stanley Elkin and Queen of the Vampires Anne Rice. “Once you really get used to a computer and get used to entering the information on the keyboard, things start to happen in your head, I mean, you change as a writer.” You're capable of do things on that you simply might never have considered before.” concluded Rice. Elkin praised his renewed appreciation for plot after purchasing a word processor in 1979: “Plots have become very interesting to me,” he said said an interviewer by the point. “You put the machine into search mode and figure out what the previous reference was, and you can start using those things as tools or nails to put the plot together.”
What Elkin and Rice describe, each in their very own way, is what composition theorists like Christina Haas call “meaning of the text.” This refers back to the mental model of the words on the page (or screen) and the way the creator perceives his relationship to them. Word processing, as testified by the testimonies of countless authors, fundamentally modified their understanding of the text, each in the best way they approached writing and in what they believed was possible. But all of this can be a far cry from “style,” which is often defined as an creator’s individual word decisions and sentence structures or arrangements.
PerfectWriter Guide, Author provided
Run text prose through a pc
But that doesn't mean that such an evaluation isn't possible. In fact, specialists have been doing it for many years. They would start by selecting a author like Isaac Asimov, someone who wrote loads and who we occur to know the precise day he acquired his first computer: a TRS-80 Model II on May 6, 1981. They would desire a digitized corpus of his books from before and after, and you then would see what you possibly can find together with your algorithms.
But even then, the query can be pressing: What would these algorithms inform you? They could reveal a previously unimagined master key to Asimov's entire oeuvre. But you could be left with something like stylometrician Louis Milic's claim Jonathan Swiftfamous ripped off by literary theorist Stanley Fish: “The low frequency of initial determiners together with the high frequency of initial links results in [Swift] an author who likes transitions and places great value on connections.”
Coincidentally, a couple of researchers a couple of years ago I did exactly this exercise with Nietzsche; Interestingly, they looked as if it would have the option to differentiate between his earlier and his later style, which revolved across the onset of his blindness and the acquisition of the writing ball. Their results were based on word frequencies, the evaluation of which showed that the philosopher's writings clustered into different groupings depending on the date the texts were written.
And yet a table of word frequencies has nothing to do with the sentence length, which was the impetus for the philosopher's own comment in the primary place. After all, Nietzsche noticed the best way by which Malling-Hansen suited himself to short bursts of text (not unlike tweets) – and never the event of his personal vocabulary. And we also know that the writing ball was just one among several workarounds that Nietzsche was eventually forced to make use of – for instance, he also dictated prose to secretaries.
Anne Fadiman once claimed She could recognize the “traces” of word processing in other authors’ prose. Using computers to trace other computers could still reveal fascinating insights into the fragile membrane between thoughts and the written word. Indeed, it might be that technology's impact on literary style is best measured in aggregate form through big data approaches: the compilation of dozens or tons of of works by authors. It can be fascinating, for instance, to know whether the specifications of the grammar checkers integrated into modern word processing programs had a measurable influence on literary prose.
But we still have all of the imponderables of hands on the keyboard. Typewriters could also be complicated, but writing itself continues to be rather more complicated.
image credit : theconversation.com