I remember when I first started university, most people did not have a personal computer, institutional emails were newly assigned in my second semester, but I rarely had the time to go to the computer lab on campus to use it (and realistically, I only knew a handful of other people who used email at that time). My assignments were allowed to be handwritten (as long as it was legible) and professors preferred that students invest in a typewriter to submit ‘clean’ copies. I remember when I could afford a typewriter with a small screen that allowed me to type up to a certain amount of characters before it ‘printed’ onto the paper, which saved me a bit of paper since I could delete as I wrote. It still wasn’t perfect. While I did have an erase function (basically, liquid paper reservoir of sorts that hid the impressed ink), I remember having to throw out entire pages due to some formatting or structural error. So much paper (and ink cartridges) wasted (even if I did have pages and pages of handwritten drafts!).
As I am sitting here today, 17 years later, I realize that I really miss my mounds of yellow legal pads that had paragraphs, notes, brilliant sentences (or so I thought at the time) all organized into manila folders for reference as I tried to piece together my assigned paper. While a lot ‘cleaner’, the folders that are obsessively organized on my laptop are hidden, out of view – and more often than not – out of mind. So many times I have written a paragraph, realized that only half of it fits, so I cut and paste the rest of the phrase onto a new word doc to be saved and filed for later. Trouble is, lately it seems, that I can never seem to find that document with the one phrase on it, or I deleted it thinking it wasn’t useful only to be saddened by the fact that it’s gone when, two weeks later, I find the perfect spot for it…
The idea of digital drafts is a great one – easily manipulatable, cut and paste has revolutionalized the way I write papers, but I find myself losing the bits and pieces and having to start fresh again (adding to the hidden mountain of work). When I really want to know if a chapter works, I still need to print it out, and read it semi-aloud in order to ‘hear’ the flaws in the flow, grammar or structure. I still need to print off umpteen amounts of pages to see if what I am working on “works” – which has got me thinking as to whether or not I should simply print each stray phrase and paragraph and file them in a physical folder on my desk – while I might not save time in having to retype the words, it would surely balance the time lost looking through all my files and folders on my computer.
kellyboudreauphd.ca 