Review on "A Better Pencil" (Ch. 1, 3, & 5)

I really appreciate Baron's writing style. His tone and historic examples (which are also very relevant) give the reader a context that is easily received and understandable.

It was enjoyable to read about Henry Thoreau's graphite and pencil industry. I was unaware that he was a business man and entrepreneur. My limited knowledge of the man had always made me think of him as "just a poet".

The real meat and potatoes in our reading assignment came in chapter five. Utilizing clay as a writing medium, Barron relayed a great deal of importance and significance when he asked his students to consider the following:

- "how writing-whether on clay or on computers-forces them to deal with the technology at the same time that they are trying to get the writing done;

- "how technology affects the content of their writing as well as the writing process;

- "how the type of writing they are doing influences the technology they are using;

- "and finally, how the technology affects the way that they read a document or text."


Reading through these considerations forced me to look at the points he was trying to make. There were many aspects in his points that I hadn't thought of before.

I had never thought of myself "dealing with the technology" as I used it. Once I learned how to use a certain technology or technologies, I would have said that I assimilated to it.

Barron's second point is one that I felt that I was already familiar with. I have utilized a caligraphy pen and inkwell, pencil, pen, typwriter, and computer. I have even written with a quill and inkwell. I definately relate to how each technology differs and the effect that it has on your style and speed during the writing process.

The third point was one that I hadn't thought of before. Perhaps the reason that I hadn't thought about it before was because I felt that the technology "assimilated" to me and I to it; a balancing act if you will. There are boundaries on all of our writing surfaces both physical and virtual. There are lines on paper, margins in word processors, finite amounts of space on hard drives, sheets of paper that only fit so much on them, etc.... What it really boils down to here is how you craft your writing into the technology. An example would be, how you space letters (linearly and lateraly) or how you punctuate. I feel that we as writers are the ones that determine how the information is constructed, but there still remains a limiting boundary that we stay within.

The last point is one that I've learned more about since I've been attending W.S.U. It seems to relate to Marshall McLuhan's "The medium is the message." You can have the same content in different mediums and it will present itself differently each time within the differing mediums. A billboard may contain a message that says, "Slow down!", however if I were to read the same thing on a sheet of paper that someone handed me, it wouldn't have the same relevance or intitiate the same response from me.

All in all I would say that I gathered more from these specific ideas and considerations than I did through the combined three chapters. These considerations or viewpoints enabled me to critically think about my own writing experiences and really tied together what he was trying to get at in the rest of the reading.