The boundaries of language I quietly cursed

DID YOU KNOW:
The guy who invented the standard Qwerty keyboard, Christopher Sholes, deliberately scattered the letters of the alphabet around on the keys inconveniently, spreading common letters far apart. The reason was practical: when typists began to type too fast, the old timey machines that they used would jam, and so Sholes mixed up the letters to slow the typists down and keep the machines running smoothly. Naturally, people adapted over time, made up for the shortcomings, and now we just have a nonsensical keyboard arrangement with a cute pet name.

This fun fact was brought to you by my Perception and Cognition textbook, the same book that brought to my attention just how automatic and unconscious typing has become for me, and probably for anyone else who spent middle- through high- school fanatically IMing their classmates. It's certainly a less conscious process than actual writing, in which you have to pay diligent attention to spelling, keep the sentences on the lines, make sure the writing is legible, and deal with the inevitable hand cramp if you're like me and hold your pencil with a grip that would strangle most small animals.

For one of my classes, throughout the semester we've been required to keep a journal, composed of reflections and self-interrogations on the class concepts. My personal process for this assignment, since the concepts were usually pretty dense and we were actually graded on our quality of thought, was to just spew ideas unceremoniously into Microsoft Word for a while, and then do more intelligently-driven editing. For the class final, we're required to write our two last journal entries in class, and the jury is still out on whether or not computers are going to be available for us to use to do it.

This, more than anything, has made me aware of the unnervingly large impact computer word processing has had on my life. I'm not at all convinced that an in-class handwritten journal entry will even resemble the positively-graded ones that I've written up until now. In the face of having to laboriously, physically scratch out my thoughts with a Bic rather than a Mac (and therefore being forced to think slower, write slower, edit less, plan more, and pay attention to my hand) the graded level of my intelligence my actually suffer. The thought makes me 1) have exponentially increased respect any novelist/writer who lived pre-1970, and 2) wonder what those authors could have done with a word processor.