an elegy for the pencil

how computers changed the way we write

Yesterday, struck by a fit of whimsy, I decided to spend the day working with a notepad and pencil instead of my phone and computer.

Perhaps it was the job of a diligent etymologist, I thought, to be in touch with a dying medium—to really ask from an experiential perspective how people wrote things in the past, as a way to understand what’s different today.

I was first taken aback by how childish the entire experience felt. My typical workflow now so revolves around software and keyboards that the Dixon No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil seemed elementary—maybe because elementary school was when I primarily encountered it before everything shifted to computers.

Indeed, the experience of writing by hand is increasingly on its way out. Schoolchildren are no longer learning cursive, as computers are integrated ever earlier into the classroom. White-collar jobs are revolving more around screens than printed paper. At a certain point in the future, the pencil is going to feel as obsolete as the stone and chisel. That’s just the way technological change works.

However, that means that something will inevitably be lost in our relationship with written language. For example, I couldn’t help but notice how I would mold my word choice around the spacing of the page lines; how the graphite imprints bled through the paper in a way that gave me pause to think; how the freedom to scrawl in the margins allowed me to caret in ideas that otherwise might not have been written the same way. The medium undoubtedly had its own constraints, but in a way that circularly reinforced the way I ultimately wrote.

These differences might seem inconsequential, but carry unbelievably compounding weight when you consider the immense canon of stories written by pencil and how they impacted our shared culture. Faulkner, Steinbeck, Atwood, Nabokov, and Morrison have all expressed a preference for pencil and notebook—preferences which surely shaped their ultimate contributions to our collective identity. There’s nothing “childish” about that.

Beyond word choice, I was also surprised to notice myself making far more spelling mistakes than I expected. These slip-ups became glaringly obvious when I had to go back and rub my eraser over the page, leaving a disappointing gray smudge in its wake, but may not even have happened on the computer, where autocorrect and predictive text finish my words before they’re even typed out. This deeply frustrated me, because I knew those words and was sure I wouldn’t have made those errors in high school. Could it be that the automated streamlining of the typing process so affected my relationship with language that I had become less precise in the process of spelling itself?

Even the frequency of spelling mistakes can affect our language. The word “sneeze,” for example, is thought to come from a misspelling of the word “fneeze” because a scholar down the line misinterpreted the initial “f” as a “long s.” That reinterpretation wouldn’t have happened if autocorrect immediately adjusted “sneeze” back to the “correct” version. In general, predictive text tools serve to reinforce norms in language like this, crystallizing “Standard English” into more concrete categories. These categories are then expressed through standard fonts, while writing remains a messier medium that allows for greater individual variation.

Consider, too, how the implementation of the keyboard limits the grouping of letters available to us in the first place. In Old and Middle English, people regularly used characters like the thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ), ash (æ), and ethel (œ). These and other letters came and went in importance, changing how we wrote and conceptualized the written word.

Admittedly, movable type and typewriters were the first to begin standardizing the modern alphabet, but the adoption of these characters into computer UI cemented their status further. Now the alphabet definitely isn’t going anywhere—nor will we have the ability to experiment, once pencil and paper fall to the wayside. Now if I want to draw a silly little character, I have to insert it as clipart, rather than as doodle in the center of my paragraph. That shifts the orientation of my text around the new character in way that integrates it differently into the overall work, changing both your perception as you read and mine as I write.

I’m actually not that concerned about these changes. For every computer that replaced a pencil, and every pencil that replaced a quill, and every quill that replaced a chisel, we’ve still been able to tell stories to each other. It’s just important to recognize that the way we’re telling the story has been affected by each successive medium.

I’m reminded of the Ancient Greek verb graphein, which is the root of both graphite (the main component of the pencil) and graphics (the main component of the digital interface). Today, we would translate the word as “to write,” but in ancient times it specifically held the connotation of “carving symbols onto clay tablets with a stylus”—yet another medium with its own implications. Nevertheless, all three words do the same thing: describe a way that we communicate to each other.