Maiming the Message Is Only Half the Danger

Well, they’ve finally demonstrated something that I’ve known all along: that computers and word processors are instruments of the devil and should be exorcised at the first opportunity--along with TV game shows, Rambo movies and the Costa Mesa City Council--if our society is to survive. Now if Lou Sheldon and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher would get behind this one, I’d be out doing fund-raisers for them.

What happened was that a University of Delaware English professor ran a test. She had her writing students compose on both computers and typewriters, then she compared the results. The typewritten essays averaged six words longer per sentence (22 to 16) than those written on computers, and only one-third of the computer writers used complex sentences as contrasted with half of those using typewriters.

OK, so you’re saying, “What’s so red-hot about long, convoluted sentences?”

Just stay with me a minute. A measure of readability called the Kinkaid Scale showed the typewritten essays to be four grades higher than those composed on a computer. Misspellings, bad punctuation and faulty grammar also happened much more frequently on the computer.

In a summary of the study called, appropriately, “Can the Machine Maim the Message?” the instructor, Marcia Halio, wrote that composing on the computer seems to “encourage a simple sentence structure and childish vocabulary” and leads to “sloppier writing and fluffier topics.” Exactly the points I’ve been trying to make for years.

Those of us who write for a living are frequently retarded mechanically. If all our energy goes into trying to figure out which key to avoid punching so the whole damned thing doesn’t go down the drain, then the creative juices left for writing are badly depleted. Writing is struggle enough without adding all these other complexities. I’m just beginning to master the electric typewriter.

I learned about the Delaware study from a column by Times business writer Michael Schrage, who quite properly suggested that “how you feel about writing affects how you write”--then later shot down this thesis by insisting that “what we write is far more a reflection of who we are than the tools we use to write about it.”

He should have quit while he was ahead. I suspect he’s probably adept at putting a new strap on a watch or replacing the washers in his kitchen faucet. But not all of us are.

I once had a friend who used to clean the spark plugs in his car--this was a long time ago--every weekend because his friends did it and he felt it was a part of demonstrating manhood. He had no idea what function the plugs performed, and he sometimes got them back in wrong. But he stayed at this for many months--and never cared to nor acquired any information about spark plugs.

I frequently followed the same pattern when I was younger and either felt obligated or was required to do such things. When I was flying for the Navy, we had to inspect our planes before we took off, and I would kick the tires and poke in the pitot tube as I had seen my associates do. But beyond recognizing a flat tire when I saw one, I had no idea what I was looking for. Fortunately, God and the maintenance crews never let me down.

In the same vein, when I bought a house many years ago that came equipped with a swimming pool, our modest income required that I do the servicing myself. I did so for many years by rote, without the faintest notion of what pipe led where or how the machinery operated.

Finally, after several expensive visits from repair people to take care of relatively simple problems, I spent a whole day teaching myself how the system worked. It wasn’t exactly like mastering a nuclear reactor, but it took me many hours, and they were quite painful. I was thereafter able to save us a good deal of repair money, but I never found much satisfaction in knowing how the system worked and probably would be illiterate once again if I had to look at it today.

The computer advocates simply refuse to weigh this anti-machine attitude when doing their missionary work among us heathens. “Pish and tosh,” they say, “an 8-year-old could master this word processor in no time at all--and it would save you many hours of work time, especially in revising and rewriting.”

It’s probably true that some 8-year-olds could, indeed, master this machine. Some 8-year-olds can also play chess and throw the curve ball, but I don’t know what this has to do with me. As for speed, if I were doing legal abstracts or cookbooks, speed would be an issue, but I can agonize over a typewriter as fast as I can over a word processor.

And not only that, the same issue of the Business Section that described the Delaware study also contained a story about the radiation danger posed by computers. We already knew about eyestrain and backache, but now a computer magazine is warning that “extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields, emanating from computer monitors, might increase one’s risk of cancer.” So I’d not only be fragmenting my creative energy, but I’d be risking cancer too. The prospect boggles the mind.

Even so, I’m going to have to deal with this whole problem in a very direct way quite soon. We are about to begin some remodeling of our home in order to--among other things--provide private office space for my wife. She has announced to me that when the work is completed, she plans to bring a computer into this household. She also plans to allow my stepson to use it, thereby risking both atrophied creativity and cancer. She seems determined about this.

I can, of course, refuse to get involved with the damned thing. But the pressures on me, already intense, will then become almost unbearable. Up to this point, I could plead poverty for not buying a computer, an argument that was usually accepted grudgingly. Now I will have to base my whole position on aesthetics--and I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold out.

The only bright spot in all this is that my oldest grandson taught me how to play chess against his computer when I visited him in Colorado last year. I got through the first two classes of difficulty and was giving the machine a hard time on the third when I left. It has occurred to me, however, that the computer probably shoots out an extra dose of radiation whenever it loses. As I’ve always said, you can’t trust those machines.