When the Mac 'Ruined' Writing
When the Macintosh was Blamed for Ruining Student Writing
🪶 Quills were once the default writing tool, when pens rose to prominence their impact on writing would be a hot debate in the literary world, one that would repeat when typewriters started to replace pens, and once more when word processors displaced typewriters.
Just as people were coming to terms with word processors in the late 1970s and early 1980s, another evolution in writing tools took place, Apple introduced Macintosh: the first commercially available computer with a Graphical User Interface (GUI.) This new paradigm of computing would garner intrigue.
As these new devices made there way onto college campuses, some academics wondered how they might impact student work. At the University of Delaware, one member of the English Department (Marcia Peoples Halio) would conduct a study on the matter culminating in a 1990 paper titled “Student Writing: Can the Machine Maim the Message?”
Her conclusion? Students using a Macintosh produced inferior work compared to their counterparts on the austere command line (30% of Macintosh writers used complex sentences, whereas 50% of the IBM writers did.) Peoples Halio would quip in the paper: “Never before in 12 years of teaching had I seen such a sloppy bunch of papers” with regards to work created on the Macintosh.
The study would catch the attention of the San Jose Mercury News that would summarize her findings: “The same icons, mouse, fonts, and graphics that make the machine easy to use may well turn off the brain’s creative-writing abilities.” The story would be picked up by numerous outlets, a few international and eventually garnered a mention in The New York Times who noted in 1992 that no study had yet refuted her findings, also noting the criticism it garnered from other academics.
The most popular critique was Halio's methodology, namely the glaring absence of control groups. An Apple representative swiftly pointed out the studies flaws, Halio retorted, acknowledging some imperfections in her study, staunchly compared giving a Macintosh to an inexperienced writer to handing a brand-new sports car to a gleeful 16-year-old. The Los Angeles Times would admit “the idea that our minds are somehow warped by our word processors” was too compelling to ignore, but was generally critical of the study.
Academic Steven Youra would publish a response to the paper the same year in ‘Computers and Composition’ where he would criticize the study's inadequate design and flawed logic, criticizing Halio's limited understanding of the Macintosh's capabilities.
“The authors central point is that students view the Macintosh as a toy, and therefore when they write with it, their language is less formal than that of IBM users, who associate their machine with high seriousness.” - Steven Youra in Computers and student writing: Maiming the macintosh (A Response)
He refuted the portrayal of Macintosh as fostering immature writing, emphasizing its potential to encourage playful, engaged writing experiences. In 1995, the same journal would publish a study that sought to address the studies flaws - producing results refuting Halio Pope’s findings.
The Chicago Tribune syndicated a column in 1991 co-written by a young Brit Hume, which concluded the debate was moot since GUIs would soon be everywhere, while noting the study likely suffered from sample bias because of the types of students who’d opt for a Macintosh in the first place (less academic more creative types.)
As we’re faced with new evolutions in writing tools - it is worth remembering this little debate and those that proceeded it, going all the way back to the original literary technology: writing itself.
Socrates critiquing writing:
“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” - Plato quoting Socrates, in the Phaedrus, 370 BCE
Another Newart post you might like:
Many Catholic School wood desks in the 1950s had little holes for glass ink wells. Students were required to use fountain pens. Ballpoints made life too easy, a near occasion of sin. The students quickly learned that the little filling lever on the side of the fountain pen could transform the writing tool into an ink projecting armament. The ballpoint might be the lesser of two evils, after all. Soon, it was out with the wooden desks, and in came metal ones without inkwell holes.
Back then Marshall McLuhan said "we shape our tools, and our tools shape us." Students have been getting dumber ever since. Correlation? Causation? Who knows? In 1967, McLuhan also predicted to our Understanding Media class at Fordham that icons would reemerge as a major form of communication. Icons were mostly thought of back than as little two dimensional holy pictures from centuries past, shiny gold halos etc. Now icons are ubiquitous, hanging out all day in the bookmarks bar, a gateway to all the world's knowledge, lighting up texts with smileys, and drawing artists, "the antennae of society" per McLuhan, to Apple products while we print-oriented dinosaurs still bang out linear sequences of letters on PCs.
Fun little history!
One thing that strikes me as super odd is the conflation of seriousness with doing meaningful work, or maturity. Somehow, all three of those things are supposed to be the same, I guess. I don't know about you, but I tend to do some of my best work when I'm being a bit playful.