I have to admit, I didn’t really like this essay that much. All the little sidenotes were too cutesy for me (my high school English teacher always used to say, “If it’s in a footnote, why not just put it in the paper itself? If you can’t put it in the paper, then it’s not that important, is it?”). The whole thing was a bit smart-alecky. But I’m praising it, so I guess I better get on with it.
What I did like about this essay was all the questioning about method. People write in different ways–in notebooks, on laptops, with different programs–so does how you write affect what the writing means? I never really thought about it before. Form clearly matters; I’ve written whole papers about that. Everyone agrees that poetry is different from journalism or an analytical essay in a way that matters because of the form. Monson was clearly trying to make a point by using an unusual form. But I think his point about method is much more salient.
For example, the fact that it took Monson about thirty seconds to complete the first page of text, when it would have taken ten with a typewriter and probably all day with a quill and a piece of parchment. Does his method of writing change the meaning of the work? I really sat and thought about that for a while, and I think it does. I don’t want to say that using a computer cheapens work or makes it less valuable, but when you think about the time that goes into it, it kind of does. I think that’s why blogs have such a reputation for being less worthy sources, because people know that they can be dashed off in a second and don’t really respect their content as a result. If someone had to lay type for a paper, then damn, you know they really put a lot of time into what they were saying. But with a blog, it’s like whatever comes to mind. Like Twitter. (Useless, right?)
I also really liked all Monson’s commentary on working with text in InDesign. I spent a lot of my high school years futzing with InDesign for my school paper, letting it control me, really, messing with line breaks and text wrapping and all the things that it does for you. But I never really thought about the ways that the program might change the meaning of what I was writing, other than the choice of font. I was, and still am, a little bit font obsessed. I can generally name most fonts from a few words of text, and I would spend hours choosing the right fonts for the things I was designing. Something about the right font made the work right too. But I never thought about all the other effects like typing on a path or a curve. Like Monson says, does that change the words and make them something different? I have to sit and think about that for a while. And maybe play with the fonts in InDesign too.
Tell me, where would we be without high school english teachers? Or, for that matter, InDesign. I too am a veteran of page layout apps — I was there when PageMaker first arrived on the scene, and I fear my design aesthetic was unduly shaped by the workflow it imposed. Great post!