“Only a small amount of text fits on the screen, and the entire text is relatively inaccessible until a printout is made.” – Christine Hult, pg 32

At first I dismissed Hult’s complaint that the screens were too small so students couldn’t access the whole text and were thus hampered in their ability to view a composition as a “whole” entity rather than a combination of parts. I figured that she was talking about old word processor machines like this:

but which we had largely moved past. I mean, have you seen the size of some of the screens that computers have? Then I realized that I was reading the article on a 13.7 x 9.5 inch screen. In realizing this I thought back to writing my answer for the 7 day prelim question just a couple weeks ago. I had written the whole thing out and was trying to revise it when I realized that I wanted to see the whole thing all at once. I wanted to make sure that it was organized nicely and that the ideas flowed well from one to another, but my little laptop screen wasn’t allowing me to do it. So I drove to campus, printed out the draft and laid the 15 pages out over several tables in HICKS and proceeded to read over and revise it pen-to-paper. This is exactly what Hult is describing when she says, “Many writers who use word processing have learned to compensate for their difficulties reading on-screen by relying on frequent printouts” (32). While I didn’t/don’t print frequently, it has been a problem for me in the past and so I have.

While I don’t agree with Hult entirely that computers have necessarily fostered and reinforced in me (or in students) a view of writing as a series of parts rather than a whole, I do see how it is difficult to actually work with a whole composition that goes beyond a few pages because of the affordances of the technologies that I have access to.