These readings made me think about how I learned to write on a computer when I was a kid, and how I taught non-traditional students to use a computer for writing during my time in Florida. On the one hand, I sympathized with the students who envisioned good writing as error free or “clean.” I remember thinking, hoping, as a kid that as long as I got the spelling and grammar correct, my writing would be “good.” I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that was a “bad writer” as a kid, but I can’t recall when the changeover happened and I became interested in conveying ideas and thought process. I know that, by then. I’d learned to compose with a computer almost exclusively, so I also count myself in the camp of writers who benefitted from computer writing in that I didn’t have to make copies. Even at a young age, I hated copying things by hand–although I do acknowledge that it made me slow down and consider my writing more. Perhaps that’s why I hated it.

I say this reminded me of teaching non-traditional students to use a computer, doing things  like double-clicking and moving the cursor with the mouse to avoid wiping out whole lines of text to fix one typo, because it highlighted for me how much of a burden using the computer was on their writing, and how inextricable from the act of writing that computers have become. It made me sad, but more than that, it showed me that teaching how to use a computer is no longer the job of the “tech” in the writing class, but that computer use is a domain of writing instruction. Keyboards and user interface as just as much an extension of writing as pencils and pens, if not even more so.