Look around you. Right in front of your face. On your screen. How many book-related terms can you find? I will start you off: bookmark, cut, copy, paste, desktop, notebook, clipboard, page, file, folder.

We understand computers through the imprimatur of books. When those first Dells and Apples started rolling off the assembly line, we needed some help understanding them, something familiar with which to navigate, conceptualize, and just plain figure out these then-revolutionary devices. So we drew upon books to structure our gradual accommodation to writing on computers.

We did the same thing to help people make the transition to the book.  Romans invented the codex, or a series of bound pages. Codices had advantages over the then-popular scroll.  A bunch of bound paper is easier to navigate than a scroll. Plus, you can write on both sides of parchment. Not to mention bulky papyri wrapped around wooden poles were none too easy to organize, store and access (Those of us who attend synagogue are reminded weekly of the physical limitations of scrolls.) But scrolls do have some advantages. Let me ask you this: are you getting a bit bored right now? Are you are reading on a screen, and want to check your email, but feel you should at least see where I am going with? Go ahead. Skip to the end.

Aha! What did you just do?  Did you, perchance, scroll?

It took centuries for people to get comfortable enough with the codex to finally give up (almost) on the scroll. As we have become acclimated to storing our documents digitally, we do not need those cute folder icons to help us figure out where to put files. Our children have fewer or no associations with cardboard clipboards and metal paper clips. We will slowly jettison these print-based metaphors for organic, computer-based ones.

Social media is also still a book—with one notable exception. Facebook (duh), Blogs (web “logs”) and email. But then we get to ….Twitter.

Aha!

update: after tweeting a link to this post, I was roundly schooled by several very smart book historians on my arguments above, which they convinced me overgeneralized print culture, books and, mostly, the crucial, contentious issue of filing. 

Imagine you are a 17-year-old high-school junior who plans to attend college. Take out a piece of paper and a pencil (not a pen). Absolutely no computers are allowed. Read the paragraph below and follow the directions beneath:

Although most people’s goal is to be happy at all times, being constantly satisfied and untroubled can actually prevent people from changing for the better. After all, why go to the trouble of changing if one is content with the ways things are? On the other hand, discontent often motivates people to make necessary changes. What revolution was not caused by widespread discontent? Who among us has not vowed to make a change because we are unhappy with some aspect of our lives?  Is discontent often the first step to action? 

Now: take 25 minutes to plan and write an essay responding to the final question. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your readings, studies, experience, or observations. You must handwrite your answer.

[25 minutes later]

Done? Now, ask yourself if you’d want someone else to read what you just wrote. Do you think a college professor might be inclined to throw your illegibly scrawled, ill-conceived collection of thoughts out the office window? You might find such a judgment unfair and wish to explain that the essay you wrote did not represent your true abilities or potential.

The above writing assignment came from the College Board’s ScoreWrite: A Guide for Preparing for the New SAT Essay. An impromptu, timed essay was added to the SAT in 2005.  The College Board claims the essay will provide colleges with a reliable indicator of student success and signal to high schools that they need to put increased emphasis on writing instruction.

The essay mirrors the kinds of writing asked of students in high schools, the College Board claims, helping writers understand the importance of audience, and helping them marshal support for their views. “There’s no reason the test should lead to formulaic writing,” he asserts.

But how else could a student prepare for such a daunting task other than to plug ideas into a formula? Hand writing a response in 25 minutes will result in superficial prose and the triumph of an already ubiquitous academic exercise, the five-paragraph essay: an –introduction that concludes with a thesis statement , three body paragraphs with supporting examples and a conclusion. The pressure to perform well on the essay adds another “teaching to the test” curricula in high schools (most states, including Ohio,require a timed essay on their required state graduation exams). Such high-stakes tests take time away from other more active, engaged  learning and leave incoming college students even less prepared for college-level writing.

What’s so bad about mastering the five-paragraph essay? College students who arrive with at least a five-paragraph model under their belts may be better prepared than those who arrive without it. But what college  writing experts know is that to improve writing, students need time to plan, reflect, and revise, something timed essays don’t allow. Further, students must feel connected to the topics they write about; writing for the sole purpose of demonstrating competency rarely produces strong prose.

Most important, learning to write is not like learning to ride a bike. As contexts and audiences change, writers must learn new knowledge, new rhetorical strategies, and new structures. That’s why high schools can never do what colleges  yearn for them to do. They can only teach high school students to write for high school, because that’s the community in which the writing occurs. Only colleges can teach undergraduates how to master our codes or academic discourses. High school and college writing differ, as does business writing from journalism, and technical prose from creative writing.

Further, someone has to score the SAT essays—an estimated 2 million a year. In the test’s first iteration, the College Board commissioned Pearson Education to oversee scoring. Pearson hired high school and college writing teachers, paying them between $17 and $22 an hour. Scorers were trained through an instructional eight-hour CD-ROM. (I once applied to be a scorer, but when I learned I’d be expected to score 220 essays in an eight-to-ten hour work day, or two to three minutes per essay, without breaks, and to agree to at least 30 hours of scoring a week, I balked.)

Scorers were encouraged to grade based upon the quality of examples students used to support their claims. The guidelines favor lengthy essays that use “SAT vocab” words and include elite cultural references. In the ScoreWrite pamphlet, for example, a top-scoring essay was lauded for using Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale “as an example of discontent motivating a society to make radical changes.” A low-scoring essay was faulted for weak critical thinking in its “appropriate but limited” example of Christopher Columbus. Essays that displayed an “impressive” vocabulary received higher scores. And though the College Board claims otherwise, longer essays generally received higher scores than shorter ones. That the essay must be handwritten provides another hurdle for some students. Messy handwriting, like an unprofessional type font, negatively influences the reader’s perception of the writer.

Even if studies didn’t already exist demonstrating that timed essays are neither reliable nor valid indicators of ability, it’s clear that no one can ace this essay cold. Performing well requires that students receive effective aids: well-trained teachers, books, Internet access, or best of all, a test-prep class. Unless these resources are equitably distributed, the essay exacerbates the educational gap in this country—exactly what the SAT initially set out to close.  

Originally administered in 1926, the SAT began as a noble experiment to create a Jeffersonian natural aristocracy, an intellectual elite drawn from the best and brightest, regardless of race or class background, through neutral testing. But it never realized that perhaps unattainable goal. Numerous studies have proven that the test is biased against minorities and low-income students. According to FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, the average verbal score for African Americans in 2004 was 430; for whites, it was 528. Those whose families earned between $20,000 and $30,000 per year averaged 459; those whose families earned above $100,000 averaged 553.

All Americans should have the chance to be admitted into college. However, high-stakes standardized testing such as the SAT will not help achieve this goal. Just as high schools will never prepare students well enough for colleges, these tests will never measure student ability regardless of educational experience or family background.

If we really want to prepare students for civil society, we should give them the tools they need to think and learn and offer them meaningful, honest contexts for writing. One idealistic Jeffersonian ideal is still alive, if limping, in our country today: universal access to publicly funded K-12 education. What might we accomplish—what gains in knowledge and learning might ensue—if the energy, money, and talents used to create, modify, administer, prepare for, complete, defend, and critique the SAT and its revamping were instead directed toward improving the educational quality of our public schools? What, for instance, if we found a way to offer all students a chance to write, and write more often, on matters of importance for real audiences, and what if we provided them with teachers who had the time and training to offer them humane, individualized feedback?

The sample essays in the ScoreWrite booklet represented a range of ideas, examples, and rhetorical forms. However, they had one thing in common: all essays argued that, yes, discontent leads to action. The prompt is flawed: it is exceedingly difficult to argue that action rarely stems from discontent. The question sets up a false debate. So too does the SAT. The issue isn’t whether the essay is a good thing; it’s how we can better educate all high-school students in all schools, and how we can then teach those who choose college  to write like college students.

Time that could be spent wrestling with big ideas and playing with language is spent preparing all-purpose, highbrow examples and learning fancy vocabulary words. Let’s hope the millions who take the test will find a way to express their discontent. Maybe they’ll discuss their unhappiness with the SAT and suggest reforms. If so, we may find their essays surprisingly lucid, engaging, and sophisticated.

The other day, I posted this question on twitter: “How is your writing different today than it was 10 years ago?”

Here are some @replies I received:

@Mathitak, writer and editor
I write and edit pretty much exclusively onscreen now.

@JBJ, professor
It’s more relaxed, and less worried. More aware of the way audiences differ, but also overlap. (Nonacademic isn’t dumber.) “Informal” is part of it. Also, maybe more welcoming? (For ex: Quotes & links for conversation, not for defense.)

@Wynkenhimself, professor
It’s looser, I think. More assertions, less endless contextualizing. Also, I’ll end a sentence w a preposition now.

@Wynkenhimself @Jbj
Is it also easier to try smth new because you can revise in the next post? Less permanence/one-shot to get it right?

@Mathitak
Emails were a little more writerly and conversational back then, and my replies were more point-by-point responses. Emails now are more, er, mission-oriented—just one or two points to discuss, very functional.

@Forestoftweets, student
I’ve learned so much respect for verbs.

Then I asked the same question on Facebook, and received longer responses:

Mary Beth Hertz, teacher
Ten years ago I was a senior in college. I would type out whole paragraphs as a stream in Word and then cut/paste to put things in the order I wanted them in. I often did outlines on paper, though, so that I knew what I wanted to write about. Sometimes I would work out the opening few sentences on paper and then move to the computer. The only thing that has changed is now I have Google Docs for that….. I tend to need to get things out of my head all in one stream and then I go back and edit. Often, I work out the logic of things in my head and then see how they sound when they end up on ‘paper.’

Maggie Galehouse, editor
Now, I write first drafts quickly, and spend 80 percent of my time editing, tinkering and fine tuning. Ten years ago, it was the reverse.

John Schwartz, businessman
Ten years ago I was much more fussy and technical about grammar and punctuation. Now I often write “incorrectly” on purpose — comma splices, sentence fragments. Because it gives me a sense of having inflection and tone of voice. I will never again use a semicolon. It’s probably less interesting, but I also think there are also many small changes in syntax that have been caused by the computerization of conversation. For example, in a sentence like this one: Your password is “foobar”. The period has to go outside the quotation marks.”

“Foobar?” That’s all I could think about after I read John Schwartz’ response. So I did what I imagine many of us do three or four times a day:  I googled it. Turns out foobar is a term used by computer coders. So I responded to John:

“Ten years ago’foobar’ was not a word. And it would have taken me a lot longer to figure that out. ”

The last decade has seen a seismic shift in how people write. We have new words, like foobar. And we have new rules. These rules are not hard and fast “laws,” as in how to punctuate a sentence (although those are changing too, as John Schwartz notes) but more like manners, the assumed ways of doing things. We have new assumptions about what is and is not appropriate and effective prose. So to write well today means something different than it did them ten years ago, though many of the “laws” remain the same.

I chose ten years arbitrarily to refer to “the beginning of the 21st century”. By the end of the 20^th century, many of us were using word processors to write, but we weren’t facebooking or tweeting, and few of us were blogging. We were probably not texting, and if we were, it was not on smart phones. We were emailing, but as @mathitak notes, the “rules” of email have changed since then.

There have been three major changes to 21^st century writing: (1) writing is more informal, or “looser”, as @wynkenhimself puts it; (2) writing is more voice-driven, more personal (you can get a sense of what the people above are like by reading their tweets and Facebook posts, and (3) writing is more audience-specific. The tweets and Facebook replies above were composed as part of a conversation with a person or specific group of people (me, or me and all my and their twitter and Facebook followers). All were written to me particularly (and they knew when they wrote them that I am a professor of writing and a writer interested in new technologies. Their responses may have been different if the question was asked, say, by their children).  And, as @jbj and @wynkenhimself show, sometimes one reply to me leads to a new conversation between two other people.

It can be hard to know how to engage in this type of writing. You might feel a bit lost and unsure of the tropes of twitter, say. But chances are, you are more comfortable with writing than you were 10 years ago. Why? Because you do it more. Think about it. Today, you may text, email and Facebook dozens of times a day. In the 20^th century, you may have gone weeks or months without ever writing anything (though you probably talked on the phone more than you do now).

For more on new rules, see:

Why You Should Stop Worrying And Learn To Use Emoticons
Forget Sounding Smart
F**k The Rules
Know Your Audience

Over the past few years of teaching undergraduates, I noticed a trend. Students were becoming excessively concerned with paragraphs. They would write two-page paragraphs, and refuse to break them up, because “it is all one idea.” Or they come pleading for transitions.  ”How can I possibly connect one paragraph to the next?” seems as dominant a question  as “Can you proofread this?” Their essays are typographically paragraph-based as well. Many are double-spaced AND indented, asserting through spacing that “now I have finished one idea and am moving to another!!!”

Why this paragraphism? Two recent, unrelated developments, I hazard: 1.) Composing on computers. A word processing screen in “normal” view frames writing on the paragraph level. Rather than conceive of one’s writing surface as a page–as when writing longhand on an 8 1/2″x11″ piece of paper, or, when typewriting, peeking behind the carriage return to see how much of a page is left–a monitor focuses our attention on the paragraph. 2.) Standardized testing. The five-paragraph essay is, after-all, named after this odd unit of breaking up thoughts, and high-school teachers and first-year writing instructors needing to prepare students for AP exams, SAT writing tests and exit exams teach to the paragraph.

Why does paragraph ascendency matter? Two reasons: it takes focus away from the sentence, where voice, style and tone are found, and it influences how we think about ideas–in shorter, discrete bursts that often leave too much “space” between each other, thus truncating thoughts. It stymies the development of more complex, sophisticated thoughts.

Introduction:

How does Twitter work as a new literary form? Not as a form of social media, or platform to get famous, or business venture, but as a writing form. Here are my ideas towards a theory of Twitter. I argue it is associative and based upon the sentence. And one other things.

Body

Twitter is an associative writing form, not a narrative one. In Twitter, we are sent somewhere else-via a link-or reminded of something. We are not telling stories. Thus, while the twitter fiction is swell and cute, it usually it misses the generic boat. Twitter promises a new slate for poets. For fiction writers, not so much. (For what I find to be a notable exception, see my piece for Economist.com). Tweets create meaning and aesthetic experiences  by reminding us, not by telling a story.

1.a.) Twitter does not operate on the narrative arc of rising action, suspense, climax, and denouement. There is no arc. Instead, Twitter is horizontal-one thing reminds one of another thing, instead of one thing leading to another thing. This works on the level of interTwittering (i.e.: Read something on the web. Think it would be nice to share. Link to it in Twitter. Go back to what you were doing), and intraTwittering (i.e. Read an interesting tweet. Respond by posting a new tweet. Go back to reading other tweets).

1.b) If there is a perspective induced by Twitter, it is an immanent one-we are all inside-rather than an objective one-here is how I see things. Twitter lacks single-point perspective (or omniscience).

2.) Twitter helps resist the curse of paragraphism.  Word processing programs and online writing have focused our attention on the paragraph. When we wrote on paper, or typed on a typewriter, writing was readily conceptualized  on the level of the page (as in  “phew! I’ve finished one of four pages of my assignment!”). Lately, the paragraph has reigned. As one cannot “see” an entire paper, or, often a whole page, when composing on a computer, writing became more shaped around the element one can easily grasp on a computer monitor-the paragraph. The paragraph is the unit of a written work most equivalent to a computer screen. Paragraph-ism has created firmer divisions between tabs, as paragraphs are conceived more distinctly, and, during the writing process, often worked on and worried before considering the next paragraph. I hazard that we have also become habituated to thinking in paragraphs: we think in topics, with a few supporting ideas. Nothing proves this more than reading 5 paragraph essays by high-schoolers and college first-years.  In the Twitterverse, we think in sentences.

2.a.) A new focus on the sentence is salutary. The paragraph is a fine element upon which to dwell, but it does not foreground word choice, syntax, and punctuation as well as the sentence does. Clarity and concision-two key elements of style-are garnered on the sentence level, and prose ethics and politics are best gleaned on the sentence level, too: the subjects and verbs we choose make a difference, as George Orwell taught us in “Politics and the English Language.” Twitter exposes how often we obscure agency, nominalize and use two words when one would do. The Twitter box, with hard lines all around, makes the space of thought stark.

Twitter may have some odd analogy to a compositor’s stick. Compositors would select type and put letters in their stick, upside down and backwards, before laying them on a galley. The average length of the type in a stick before laying down (or “publishing”) is not too far from 140 characters.

Conclusion:

There is no summing up on twitter. There are many arrows pointing one across (not up or down) to the ideas of others, cross-fertilization, and forced attention to the composition of sentences.

(for a guide on how to tweet, see Why Tweet? And How To Do It)

I’ve been following the news of Apple’s new iBook Authoring platform with particular interest, as I am currently co-editing a textbook, aimed at first-year composition courses, for Pearson, one of the “big three” education publishers. In fact, we have a deadline today, so I’ve been bouncing back and forth between finishing one chapter for our editors and reading the news from Apple.

Over the course of the day I’ve swung from applauding Apple to becoming quite grouchy at the company. Here are some issues I come back to:

–right and permissions. Many textbooks, including the one I am working on, are anthologies, full of reprints of the work of others. How is Apple handling the question of rights and permissions?

–as I understand it, any book produced and sold with iBook Author could not be sold any other place. So not only would instructors adopting my book be telling students what to buy but also where they must buy it. That makes me uneasy, plus—

–the students would have to own an iPad!

–It seems one could create a textbook and then export it and sell it elsewhere. However, the terms state that “only text can be exported.” Well, that sort of defeats half the purpose of an “image rich environment blah blah,” no?

–The book I’m working on is using the web as a complementary resource, directing students to links and using collaborative tools. Would the textbook sold through Apple have to sacrifice these features?

I’m sure many dogged tech reporters will provide some answers soon. And I hope the work I am doing today does not end up unwittingly contributing to a more closed, proprietary and expensive educational experience for college students down the line.

A few weeks ago, I saw a notice about a self-published book called “New To Cleveland: A Guide To (re)Discovering The City.” I didn’t think much of it, because, well, you know: self-published, blah blah. But I clicked on the link. Now this, I thought, is one beautiful website: New To Cleveland.

I bought a copy of the book, but still did not expect too much. I decided to spend $30.00 simply as a gesture of support these folks who had done a yeoman, admirable job of pulling together such a pretty website and writing a book on a good topic. But then I opened it up. The inside of the book was as beautiful as the website. Wonderfully designed and gorgeously illustrated, the text was smart, on point, useful and revelatory. I read it cover to cover the night I bought it. I told all my friends about it. And I sent a note to Karen Long, book editor at Cleveland’s Plain Dealer.  She was similarly impressed, and led her Sunday book page with a review.

Last night, I met with Justin Glanville, the writer of the book. He told me they have almost sold out their print run of 1,000–for a book that has been out for only about 6 weeks, had no publicist or marketer, and cost a hefty-ish $30.00. That, methinks, is a lot of copies. Glanville and his collaborator, Julia Kuo, put up their own money for the printing costs, and they have earned it back and are in the black. Go risk-taking paired with smarts and talent, I say.

What next, though? Glanville and Kuo don’t have many copies left. They are not sure whether they should self-finance another print-run, work with a traditional publisher or put out an e-book. Me, who usually has an opinon on everything, is not sure what the best answer is either, though I do think  part of the book’s value lies in its design and unique beauty as a work of book arts, although it certainly could stand alone as a trove of useful information.

The part of my life that I pay the most “continual partial attention”to is the future of publishing. It is there in my twitter feed, random clicks on publishing-related links and amazon (yes, I said it) surfing. Most of the sounds and nouns I half-hear on this part of my brain go something like this: “publishingtwitterbankruptcyselfpublishingebooksblogsinnovationplatform”

Everyone is in a tizzy! But if I tear myself away from distractions and boil it down, it’s pretty simple: the old model is on its last legs, and there are a thousand possible new models out there vying for attention.

The people angling for the next killer app are the back of the house folks: the marketers, “social media gurus” hired by publishers, distributors, sellers, pundits. Lots of people are busy building new things. They are hiring people to tell them what it might be. They are launching new beta platforms. They are flying to conferences to hear “thought leaders”. Boil that down and it goes like this: lots of money is being spent trying to figure out what’s next.

Meanwhile, in their pajamas and at the coffeehouse, while taking a break from their manuscripts, authors and writers like me are logging on to twitter, facebook, blogs and becoming much savvier at how publishing works. It is less of a mystical “and then a man with a pipe picks up the phone” story of how a Scrivener file gets on a display table at Barnes & Noble. Writers–even those outside of New York and MFAland– are talking to readers, fellow writers, sharing war stories, agents, comparing royalty statements (“so that minus sign means it lost money, right?”). They are building communities by starting blogs, tweeting–all those things that are said any serious writer must do to be viable. This means that authors are now more of a community than before, and one not as beholden to location and background as before.

While the publishers are spending money trying to figure out what readers might want, writers are spending time figuring out how publishing works.

So here’s my radical idea: why don’t some of those people spending money on prototypes, consultants and new websites no one ever visits give a small percentage of those dollars directly to authors? Specifically, to those authors who have already sunk costs into understanding the business end of publishing? Those dollars would go much further than that consultant’s fee.

Small seed grants made directly to authors with proven track records and good ideas would garner a far better ROI than hiring another marketing consultant or developing another way for traditional publishers to “reach out” to readers. Got a new idea for how to market or publish books? Hire an author to test it out.

I know, I know, this is naive. Even worse, it is a *rant* based upon naivete. Yuck. I hate coming upon blog posts just like this when I am distracting myself.

Still: it irks me to count in my head, as the twitter stream gurgles by, all the money being poured into antic publishing experiments while authors are finding advances and contracts increasingly hard to come by.

For writers, the calculus is simple: Money=Time. Time=Writing. Writing=Cool New Books.