A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution.

摘要

When I was a senior in college in 1975 and had a last term paper to write, a technical-whiz roommate urged me to write it on a computer. I foolishly took his advice. I spent a week trooping to a dingy basement in a chemistry lab where there were terminals hooked up to a distant DEC PDP-10.I had to learn countless codes to format indents and paragraph breaks and even just to make corrections, and I had to wait forever when I wanted a printout of a draft. Typing and revising a fifteen-page paper took me every evening for a week, and when it was done it printed out in very large type with justified right margins made straight by the insertion of vast spaces between words. It looked like the world's longest ransom note. I vowed never to try to write anything on a computer again.I was reminded of that experience reading A Better Pencil, Dennis Baron's brave attempt to tell the history of how writing and reading technologies have changed the ways we write and read. He tells a broad and kaleidoscopic story in a short space. What is brave about it is not only the range of what he has chosen to cover but also the fact that the technologies he covers have been changing so fast lately that the book was bound to be obsolete almost before it came out.