Around 1971, Ray Tomlinson developed the idea of networked electronic mail, which was hugely attractive to me because it replaced uncertain voice calls with the clarity of text. The development of the Internet was undertaken in the context of heavy use of email.
The rise of video conferencing has actually been a huge challenge for me as it reintroduces some of the uncertainty of voice calling and I look forward to real-time, automatic captioning to overcome the limitations that medium poses for me.
What message do you have for people creating technology today and how they should think about accessibility?
It must be thought through during the design phase of any product. Accessibility and ease of use go hand in hand. Many people experience temporary disability (broken arm, leg, finger, blocked ears…) and appreciate the value of accessibility features from that experience. There is no excuse for making products that are not accessible.
Appreciation for plain text and written communication is part of the Unix philosophy on which the Internet was built. Unix is “the geek Gilgamesh epic; it’s a tale told in plain text.”
Authors and writers of all stripes can learn a lot about creating and managing words from computer programmers, beginning with an appreciation for the simple, durable efficiencies of plain text. Anybody running Unix, Linux, or BSD already knows all about text, because it’s the third prong of the Unix Tools Philosophy:
Write programs that do one thing and do it well;
Write programs that work together;
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
The geeks who made Unix nearly 40 years ago made plain text the universal interface because they believed in economy, simplicity, and reliability.
If Unix is the geek Gilgamesh epic, it’s a tale told in plain text.
This list maps my main keyboard flow. There are many more keybindings in my life than presented here, but these are some highlights.
My core flow runs through the spacebar. The tools I use most are mapped to its thumb thumpable expanse.
My workflow is very plain text and Markdown heavy. I’m a text and information worker, and these are some of my tools.
Legend:
Hyper – Karabiner Elements maps my Caps Lock key to Cmd+Ctl+Opt+Shift. This serves as my Hyper key. It also serves as an escape key when pressed and released (as opposed to using it as a modifier in a chord with other keys). This dual behavior is very useful. Launching with a Hyper key chord and then dismissing with the Hyper key is nice flow. If you have an app or miniwindow that doesn’t dismiss when it’s hotkey is pressed again, try putting it on a dual behavior Hyper key so you don’t have to reach for Escape or Cmd+w. Recent updates to Karabiner Elements make it easy to install a Caps Lock package with several different caps lock behaviors.
<KM> – This indicates the keybinding is handled by Keyboard Maestro, a favorite workflow automation tool.
The Ulysses app showing my writing queueThe Sublime code editor showing a Markdown file from the Calypso source code repository.
As a hacker and writer, I spend a lot of time in text editors. Almost everything I write starts in my favorite text editor. A text editor is my thinking space. It is a place for moving around blocks and tinkering with parts. It is a place to explore my mind and write it the way I want it to read. Iteration and ideation happen in my editor. My notes are not just a record of my thinking process, they are my thinking process. Text editors are extensions of mind that facilitate thinking.
All of this happens in beautiful, wonderful plain text.
I love that with plain text the focus is on the words, not the formatting. I love that it’s portable and can be used anywhere and everywhere, in any piece of software that edits or displays words. I love how easy it is to create beautifully formatted documents when needed. Most of all, I love how fast it is. I simply work more efficiently since switching to plain text.
With blogs, plain text editors, and team chat, we have a wide selection of often free tools that enable the cultivation of authentic writing for authentic audiences. Instead of ELA rubrics that kill the joy of writing with remediation and formulaic prescriptions, students can write about what they care about and share that writing collaboratively with real audiences. Relax control over the writing process. Encourage revision and tinkering without the red ink of assessment. Don’t define and model students into the stilted, joyless unreadability typical of rubric writing. Get out of the way, let kids write, and write alongside them. Let them write not for grades, but to share their lived experience, share their passions, and affect their worlds.
Keyboards, spellcheckers, and assistive tech encourage writing and editing. Let students fill their toolbelts and start writing without shackles.
Below are selections on writing in education, writing for authentic audiences, writing for empathy, writing for English language learners, and writing as a means of accommodating neurodiversity. At the end are selections on plain text and markdown flow. Plain text + Markdown is my favorite flow, but the important part is writing, collaboration, and connecting with audiences, no matter the tools.
“I’ve had a fair number of kids that were traditionally disengaged— The most common complaint: ‘I don’t like to write, so I don’t like school.’ When I said, ‘Well, you can type it. You don’t have to write; you can type. And you can use the spell checker, and you can look up words.’ All of the sudden they say, ‘Oh, OK. I’ll do that.’”
“If you’re not a good writer, sitting and writing on a piece of paper is hard. But when they have a computer that can help with spelling, and with grammar, and they can go online and look up words and the pronunciation, and they can hear how it’s said, and they can write it down correctly. Now they feel good about themselves because they’re not getting a paper back with a thousand red marks all over it, correcting grammar and spelling that they don’t necessarily understand in the first place.”
High school students are often reluctant writers, especially when assigned to produce work that is uninteresting and unrelated to their personal lives. However, writing is a vital part of the help desk. Apprentices, both on and off the Communication Team, regularly craft articles for the support blog. My team offers starter ideas, but the apprentices select most topics based on their interests and the support needs of their peers. In this setting, writing feels less stilted, less pedantic, and more authentic. Writing for a real-world audience is vastly different from a traditional school writing assignment where a single teacher is a sole spectator.
Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.
while many parents worked hard to ensure their children were regular readers, they rarely pushed them to become regular writers.
We are now a global culture of avid writers.
As Brandt notes, reading and writing have become blended: “People read in order to generate writing; we read from the posture of the writer; we write to other people who write.” Or as Francesca Coppa, a professor who studies the enormous fan fiction community, explains to me, “It’s like the Bloomsbury Group in the early twentieth century, where everybody is a writer and everybody is an audience. They were all writers who were reading each other’s stuff, and then writing about that, too.”
So how is all this writing changing our cognitive behavior?
• • • For one, it can help clarify our thinking. Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.
Poets famously report this sensation. “I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind,” Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. “If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
Culturally, we revere the Rodin ideal— the belief that genius breakthroughs come from our gray matter alone. The physicist Richard Feynman once got into an argument about this with the historian Charles Weiner. Feynman understood the extended mind; he knew that writing his equations and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought. But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.” No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his thinking process. They were his thinking process.
Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.
The explosion of online writing has a second aspect that is even more important than the first, though: it’s almost always done for an audience.
When you write something online— whether it’s a one-sentence status update, a comment on someone’s photo, or a thousand-word post— you’re doing it with the expectation that someone might read it, even if you’re doing it anonymously. Audiences clarify the mind even more.
Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions. This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly.
When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.
But studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.
When asked to write for a real audience of students in another country, students write essays that are substantially longer and have better organization and content than when they’re writing for their teacher. When asked to contribute to a wiki— a space that’s highly public and where the audience can respond by deleting or changing your words— college students snap to attention, writing more formally and including more sources to back up their work.
“Often they’re handing in these short essays without any citations, but with Wikipedia they suddenly were staying up to two a.m. honing and rewriting the entries and carefully sourcing everything,” she tells me. The reason, the students explained to her, was that their audience— the Wikipedia community— was quite gimlet eyed and critical.
We asked our building leadership teams, and we asked those Principals and Assistant Principals to ask their teachers, to experience a bit of “writing for empathy.” Medical educators have discovered that when doctors write from the point of view of their patients, empathy increases and the quality of care increases. We thought it might be worth seeing if this applied to our educators as well.
So we began, and told them not to be limited by structure – choose any writing mode you’d like – or grammar or spelling or where or how to write – on the floor, standing up, on paper, on phone, on computer – to just find the emotional path and write.
We so often stop our students from writing… we tell them that everything from how they sit to how they spell is more important than communication… and we thus raise children who hate writing.
This became powerful. People not only chose every and any place to write, every and any device to write on, they chose modes from poetry to an email exchange between high school students in class, from narrative to internal monologue to dialogue in the corridor. From tweet and text to song.
It is remarkable what happens when you stop telling people how to write and start encouraging them to write.
“Our kindergartners and first graders are natural writers,” one principal said, “and then we tell them to stop and worry about handwriting and spelling and punctuation, and they never really write again.”
And then we asked these leaders to share with another, and it became magical. The excitement of reading to each other, of listening, of wondering. People leaned into each other, with genuine smiles – smiles of recognition – and heard. The room was filled with the kind of excitement that – yeah – is mighty rare at Principal Meetings, that is – sadly – often rare in Language Arts classes.
First, students need to be writing constantly. Learning to write well, like any other skill, takes many, many hours of practice. Second, students need to write for a real audience and to receive regular, structured feedback from their audiences. Other than looking at the grade on the front of the paper, students are usually totally indifferent to the teacher’s opinions of their work. But when they are writing for or presenting to an authentic audience, which has been asked to assess the work being presented— whether it is their peers or someone outside of school— they work much harder to polish their work, and they seek and pay attention to feedback. Writing for a real audience, and writing about things they know and care about, are central to students’ development of an authentic voice in their work.
The problem with the way writing is currently taught, then, is the same problem that we have described throughout this book. Teachers spend an inordinate amount of time teaching the mechanics of writing— parts of speech, grammar, spelling, punctuation— without giving students any reason whatsoever to want to write, because that’s the way we have done it since 1893. And in the last ten years teachers have spent less and less time assigning and grading students’ writing because they must prepare students for meaningless tests that tell us absolutely nothing about the competencies that matter most.
What little writing that gets done in high schools today is almost always practicing short answers to test prompts and memorizing the mechanics of the standard five-paragraph essay, and nothing else. We are told that the new Common Core tests will require more writing, but it will only be more of the same kind of writing.
Computational resources are now affecting aspects of English classes in significant ways. Students type or dictate essays and benefit from embedded spelling and grammar tools. Granted, autocorrect software has a mind of its own. But when it’s almost impossible to write a word like receive, the days of memorizing rhymes like “i before e, except after c, or when sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh” are over.
In many ways, the story of dyslexics— in school and life— is the story of U.S. education. Driven by standardized tests, schools focus on low-level capabilities (e.g., memorizing the proper spelling of words). High-potential kids (e.g., dyslexics, smart creative types, rebels) get “down-graded” and left behind. Advances in automation shine light on the fact that these low-level tasks (e.g., spelling receive correctly) are incidental to, not essential to, a person’s life prospects.
He was a slow typist. A painfully slow typist. And yet, his typing was about three times as fast as his handwriting, and, in the end there was a perfectly completed job application.
I wrote this book to help you remedy problems that many young writers face when they confront empty screens and pages. These writers experience frustration and even defeat as they strain against contrived procedures with intangible tools. Over time, these tensions propagate a quiet trauma: Children begin to believe that they can’t write, and then they stop trying. How many adults might be able to advocate for themselves or for justice in their communities if negative early experiences with writing hadn’t silenced them? Many children and adults will tell you that writing is beyond their grasp. They can’t wrap their hands around their ideas, and since they learn best by tinkering with things physically, writing remains literally out of their reach. Maybe the problem isn’t the writer. Maybe it’s the way we’re defining and teaching writing.
Many writers need to move, and they need their writing to move as well. They need to write while out of their seats and on their feet, spreading their ideas across whiteboards and tables, lifting pieces up with their hands, cutting them apart, randomizing them, and tacking them into new and completely unpredictable forms. These writers need access to diverse tools and resources— far more than paper, laptops, and iPads. They build their stories using blocks and boards. They blend plot lines using sticky notes and grids. It’s not enough for these writers to study mentor texts. They need to tear them apart— physically. They need to use their hands to play with text in order to become adept.
Making writing requires dynamic spaces, collaborative cultures, specialized tools, and a commitment to using our words to make a meaningful difference for others.
To teach effectively, we must pay attention to how individuals write and respond to what we observe rather than allowing our personal passions, expertise, and assumptions to drive instruction.
Give writers the permission they need to explore writing using diverse tools and processes. Help them discover how they write. Making is an invitation, not an expectation.
Given similar tools and conditions, I’ve noticed that most adept writers will happily tinker with their writing in the same way people tinker inside maker spaces.
Too many have been taught that everything they need to know will be defined and modeled for them.
We spent thousands dollars, thousands of hours on trying to fix one trait, frankly, perhaps the most irrelevant trait in the world in the 21st century, and that is spelling. God bless spellchecker.
The energy gone into fixing spelling, to worrying about spelling, it’s staggering.
All week we invested time, money, and relationship capital on fixing that irrelevant trait.
We’re not doing the spelling test today. We’re ditching school and going to the zoo.
Ultimately our diagnoses and the subsequent attempts at intervention allowed people to blame us, two powerless kids, for our failure instead of turning a critical eye toward the environment. It took us fifteen years of personal and academic struggle to stop blaming ourselves, to stop believing that we are inherently defective like “they” thought, and to come to realize how profound an effect the environment had on our inability to succeed. Only as time went on did simple interventions like the ability to get up out of our seats, the use of a spell checker, and progressive ideas like project-based learning and other modifications to the learning environment allow the pathology to slip into irrelevance and enable us to be successful. Our hard wiring is a simple cognitive difference. We all have them. But an oppressive educational environment that blames children for their failures caused us to grow up with the stigma of pathology.
He starts by asking students to “think about writing a paper around a question that they really want to find an answer to.” Elliott teaches that first step in constructing a semester-long paper is “gathering information about a question you are passionate about.” He adds: “I usually do the research and writing right along with them. They see that I’m doing the same thing they are doing. That’s an old schoolteacher tool — one of the best I’ve run across for sharing power with students.”
We are not usually so obvious in our stated biases, but every day in schools I see students punished for their voices, punished for their culturally ingrained reading styles, punished for refusing to over-simplify, because we teach reading and writing in the same way the English like to teach tea drinking.
And so I wonder, (a) where does my communication fit into your school? your Common Core? your library? your classroom? and (b) where does that democracy of voice fit in? How do we embrace that and not squash it?
The world is a place of constant reinvention. If we all follow the rules, the paths, nothing changes. There is a reason the books of the colonials so often fill the Booker Prize shortlists, there is a reason Irish fiction and poetry are prized so much more highly than that of the English or Americans.The rules have never fully taken root away from “the Queen’s English,” and the paths begin in very different places, and it is the uncommon, not the common, which has extraordinary value.
Likely the sole act of sitting in a classroom writing an assignment for a teacher is not going to inspire a unique and developed voice for any student. It lacks meaning and urgency. If they don’t understand the purpose, the writing will mirror the effort.
With today’s society shifting to technology, writing and publishing has become immediate and public. Students don’t have to only write for an audience of one. From their phones they can write whole blog posts to share with an authentic global audience whenever they want from wherever they want. Our job now needs to be to hone their unique voices and inspire deep levels of reflection on their terms, not ours.
There are many platforms that are free and easy to use and made age appropriate for all levels of students. Whether using a Google account with Blogger or starting with Edmodo or Edublogger, teachers can use the right platform to help students express thoughts publicly.
Publishing is no longer just for scholars and established authors. We can all be authors and encouraging a public space to develop the subtle intricacies of writing makes even the novice writer empowered.
If our end goal is to get students writing more, then we need to allow for some of that writing to be less structured. The mere act of thinking and communicating in writing, often, improves the way we think, even if the writing isn’t terribly good at first. More importantly, writing becomes a habit of mind, one that students enjoy doing as they manipulate their blogs and real people share feedback and comments about their thoughts. It’s less about the correctness and more about connection.
Teachers can model good blogging behaviors by writing their own blogs and using them as a tool to share with students. The more authentic we can be in what we teach, the more likely students will be to hear us. Create a space that is truly yours to share ideas, reflections, experiences and then experience the power of an audience to validate them all. Blogging connects us in a way writing in a classroom never can and that’s why we need to be using it.
Supposed tensions such as “Do we hold students accountable to sound mechanics?” or “Do we let students engage in self-expression?” are not actually tensions when students are required to work in a full rhetorical situation because they are forced to do what all writers must do — make choices and wrestle with ideas that will be presented to interested audiences.
Do that enough times in enough different contexts and not only will you learn how to write, but when you’re confronted with a type of writing you haven’t done before, you’ll be able to figure out how to write in that form or genre as well.
In reality, the problems of writing instruction have much less to do with our state of knowledge on how to teach writing, and much more with the systems in which students and teachers must learn and teach. Because of the increasing emphasis on standardized metrics as the route to “college and career” readiness, prior to college, students spend little time engaging with writing that demands they work inside a full rhetorical situation.
Composing occurs in different modalities and technologies
Composing has always required technology, whether it’s the technology we associate with print–including pens, pencils, and paper–or the technology we associate with the digital–including word processors, digital imaging software, and the Internet. Like all texts, print texts are multimodal: print, whether hand-created or machine-produced, relies for meaning on multiple modalities, including language, layout, and the visual characteristics of the script. Moreover, print has often included visuals–including maps, line drawings, illustrations, and graphs–to create a fuller representation of meaning, to tap the familiarity of a visual to help readers make meaning in a new genre, to add aesthetic value, and to appeal to a wider audience. Film, television, and video involve such combinations of modalities, as do presentation software and websites. As technologies for composing have expanded, “composing” has increasingly referred to a suite of activities in varied modalities. Composers today work with many modalities, including language, layout, still images, other visuals, video, and sound. Computers, both the stationary and mobile varieties, provide a work environment where composers can employ and combine these modalities. Moreover, the Internet not only makes a range of new and diverse materials available to writers, but also brings writers and readers closer together and makes possible new kinds of collaborations. Thus, when students have access to a computer with full Internet access, composing opportunities expand.
Additionally, increased access to various modalities and technologies has created opportunities for students with a wide range of abilities, backgrounds, and languages to compose with more independence and agency. As more digital tools become available, and more forms of expression are not only accepted but expected, more students are able to employ these tools independently.
What does this mean for teaching?
Writing instruction should support students as they compose with a variety of modalities and technologies. Because students will, in the wider world, be using word processing for drafting, revision, and editing, incorporating visual components in some compositions, and including links where appropriate, definitions of composing should include these practices; definitions that exclude them are out-of-date and inappropriate.
Over my more than three-decade adventure as both a writer and a teacher of writing, I have rejected writing templates (five-paragraph and otherwise), the tyranny of the thesis sentence, rubrics, and writing to prompts as well as detailed writing assignments that relieve students of any choices as writers and thinkers. However, I remain mostly baffled at what works instead of these traditional approaches—and continue to seek ways to understand better what impedes my students from writing—and thinking—with greater sophistication.
My work as a teacher of writing will now include more aggressively investigating how to address coherence better, how to foster purpose and awareness in my students-as-writers.
Rules and prescriptions, I am convinced, impede the development of conceptual understanding of how and why to form sentences and paragraphs in order to achieve an essay—a non-fiction short form with an opening and closing, with claims supported by evidence and elaborations.
Templates and prescriptions may make the journey seem easier, but ultimately, that trip is hollow because students have mastered mostly compliance.
Writing, however, is an act of composing—building something new out of the craft at the writer’s disposal. There is no way to make that easy, but there are ways to make it purposeful. That is grounded in conceptual awareness of authentic and whole artifacts; the essay always in pursuit of the essay.
"Writing is best taught as a recursive process which includes (but isn’t necessarily limited to) pre-writing, drafting, revision & editing." https://t.co/erC4Fy1cBr
Blogging is a way to document, reflect, and share pedagogical strategies and teaching tools used in the classroom. With the benefits of blogging as a reflective teaching tool, why not use this tool with our students in the classroom? Teachers are integrating blogging as a communicative storytelling mode for students to share stories, thoughts, ideas, responses, discussions, and many other types of communication in the classroom.
Blogging is limitless in terms of structure. As a result, a blog can be an image or video with a thought-provoking caption. It can be a beautiful quote with thoughts strung to it. It can also be a digital story that moves the reader to think, reflect, and feel. A study conducted by Advanced Placement and The National Writing Project found that three-quarters of teachers believe the use of Internet and digital tools has an “overall positive impact” on students’ research habits and communication skills (Purcell et al. 2012). Another study on the impact of digital tools on students’ writing also found that “96% agree that digital technologies ‘allow students to share their work with a wider and more varied audience’” (Purcell, Buchanan, and Friedrich 2013). Clearly, exposing students to different modes of technologies can play a huge factor in developing and shaping their thoughts and ideas. By providing the opportunity for students to communicate in a framework of multiliteracies, we can even begin to see improvement in their research, writing, and critical thinking skills (Purcell, Buchanan, and Friedrich 2013). Blogging needs to be seen as a “formal” mode of writing because it provides an opportunity for students to engage in reading and writing and in turn to strengthen communication skills. Digital writing for English language learners (ELL) can provide students the platform, space, and opportunity for social, cultural, and communicative support.
Digital writing—including blogging, microblogging, writing on social media platforms, and tweeting—also allows students to gain access and control of their own learning. Students who communicate their learning online can see the wide opportunities that are available to them, and in turn, they start to value those opportunities. Research suggests that allowing students to write digitally empowers them by providing them a choice.
Blogging helps students to see that the language is a tool to communicate with other people in social settings. It can also help them to recognize that their writing is a form of interaction in the digital world. This realization will help them in the long run when building their professional learning portfolio online. By using blogging as a communicative tool, students are embracing digital communication, which in turn opens different pathways and opportunities for them.
How often do we tell students not to use I or me in writing? We tend to steer them clear of first-person pronouns in writing for many reasons: It takes away from the strength of their arguments, it makes a statement subject, it does not sound professional, and many other reasons. However, when it comes to blogging and English language learners, encourage them to use the I pronoun. This will help them with the flow of their ideas. For example, many students feel comfortable starting a sentence with “I think” or “I believe” or “In my opinion.” It is perfectly fine for them to do that because blogging is a self-reflective mode of writing.
Communicative practices have a real-life purpose, and as a result, when assigning blogs, make sure that they have a purpose and a connection to communication practices that we do in the real world.
Social and cultural support for English language learners can come in many forms, and digital writing can help with this. Blogging, specifically, opens pathways for students to learn about one another’s social and cultural norms, and more importantly, students end up connecting with one another. The big question remains: How do we leverage blogging as a tool to connect the teacher and students socially and culturally? As previously stated, blogging helps students to develop an understanding and appreciation of each other’s social and cultural practices. It also helps to break down barriers between different cultural beliefs, and even more so, it helps to shatter stereotypes that we often have about different societies and cultures.
When students blog about their learning, they also inherently discuss their takes on the lesson and what went on in the classroom that day. This helps the teacher to see and identify areas to help students meet their individual learning needs. More importantly, this feedback is vital to improve the teacher’s pedagogy. By seeing how students benefited or didn’t benefit from the lesson, the teacher can implement changes in her teaching style and methodology in the next lesson, ensuring that each student’s learning needs are being met with personalized pedagogy. Blogging can bridge the communication gap between the teacher and students. Many students, especially English language learners, have a hard time sharing their learning progress or lesson reflection with the teacher. Blogging can also merge face-to-face communication with digital communication. If a student is not comfortable having a face-to-face conversation because of a lack of confidence in his or her oral skills, shyness, or cultural barriers, then the teacher can encourage him or her to write a blog post to reflect on how the lesson went.
This standard supports digital writing for English language learners, as collaboration is also one of the key practices that helps English language learners to learn better. Ferlazzo (2016) states that “collaborative writing has been found to be particularly helpful (PDF) to English-language learners (ELLs) in lowering anxiety and increasing self-confidence and motivation.”
“Blogging is immensely valuable for ELLs. While we can expect it to produce significant writing gains, blogging also helps learners grow their listening, reading and speaking skills when incorporated with other activities. Blogging involves a great deal of reflective thought, enabling students to develop thinking skills in English. Furthermore, blogging gives them a voice, validating and celebrating their place in this world. The most rewarding aspect of blogging, however, is when students read their older posts and are able to see their growth.”—Anabel Gonzalez, who has been teaching since 1996.
Ditch That Textbook provides examples of how to use blogs and team chat in the classroom. Chapter 3, Use Technology to Defeat Insecurity, offers good insight into the neurodiversity friendliness of backchannels, something familiar to tech workers. Written communication is a great equalizer and an important part of collaborative hacker culture.
A backchannel is a separate, often text-based, discussion students engage in while they’re receiving information via a lecture, a movie, a television show, or a PowerPoint presentation. Students use a digital device to participate in a behind-the-scenes chat so as not to disturb others trying to listen.
Backchannels provide the perfect outlet for students who have something to say but refuse to open up in class discussions. When everyone participates in the conversation, no one feels singled out. As a result, inhibitions about sharing decrease and the courage to speak up increases. Plus, when everyone types at once, the teacher spends less time calling on students one by one.
I personally believe that the backchannel is the greatest unharnessed resource that we as educators have available to us. It does not threaten me nor bother me that you learned as much if not more from the backchannel the other night — in fact, it makes me feel great that I facilitated the connection.
And that’s not even touching on the ways this kind of technology supports the shy user, the user with speech issues, the user having trouble with the English Language, the user who’d rather be able to think through and even edit a statement or question before asking it.
Written communication is the great social equalizer.
Remember this if you start to fear your Autistic child is spending too much time interacting with others online and not enough time interacting with others face-to-face. Online communication is a valid accommodation for the social disability that comes with being Autistic. We need online interaction and this meta-study demonstrates exactly why that is the case.
I couldn’t help wondering, since the study showed the durability of first impressions and the positive response to the written words of Autistics, with all visual and auditory cues removed, could we mitigate childhood bullying in any way by having a class of students meet first online, in text, and form their first impressions of one another in that format before ever meeting face-to-face?
Getting online was revolutionary and may have saved my life.
But when I got online, no one could see (or smell) that about me. All they could see was my words and ideas, and that was what people judged me by. For the first time in my life, I was not found lacking. I made friends of all ages. I was respected and liked. The difference between offline and online communication could not have been more dramatic.
A big part of the problem is that we’re often using the wrong default tool to create our words. When ready to write, the majority of computer users will open a word processor like Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages rather than a text editor like Notepad on Windows or Text Edit on the Mac. We do this even if we’re simply drafting an email or jotting down notes to ourselves. The problem actually lies in the name. A word processor, while capable of being used for the creation of words, is actually optimized for formatting text in order to be printed or read. Whereas a text editor is more focused the creation and editing of your words.
Where a graphical Word processor might boast that “what you see is what you get,” a text editor can boast “what you see is what is there.” Nothing is hidden.
For this reason, plain text documents are much more stable and sustainable through the process of composition and revision than word processor documents. That doesn’t mean there’s something inherently wrong with word processors. What it does mean is that word processors are the right tools for the job when the job is formatting and processing complex documents, and not necessarily the right tools for the job when the job is writing.
The basic idea behind a plain-text workflow is that you do your composing with a text editor in a sustainable, universal format, and then, only when your text is ready to send somewhere–say, to a journal for publication–do you worry about formatting.
Text editors are tiny pieces of software compared to word processors, so they start instantaneously, load documents almost instantly, and run like lightning even on old hardware. Nothing gets between you and your words.
Plain text writing (and marking up text elements for later formatting) is simple. If you’ve been socialized in Word (like me), you may disagree at first. But I believe that if you try plain text writing, you’re likely to change your mind and come to enjoy its purity and simplicity. As for myself, I think now that text processors are actually cumbersome, and many writers just got so used to this fact that they don’t question it anymore.
So writing plain text means to separate writing from formatting for the sake of productivity. The essential structural elements of a text are marked up while writing: You can write headings of various levels, add emphasis, add lists and more. What you can’t do: Tweak margins, or choose your first order headings to be 24 pt, and red-colored. All the layout tasks that have nothing to do with the content you’re trying to compose. Take care of layout later. This first instance should be about writing, and writing only.
If you want to publish your text more than once, but in different formats, plain text is very effective – thanks to the use of markup, you can easily convert it. Ulysses, as an example, can use one and the same text to create a formatted PDF, an e-book or standard HTML – with just a few clicks.
Once you start working with plain text documents, you realize the power of their infinite portability and compatibility. You can edit them anywhere, on just about any device, and never break anything. It’s addicting.
The popular Markdown syntax is valuable for text editing because it allows you to add formatting while maintaining this portability and compatibility. You might think that formatting text by typing special characters is nerdy and distracting. Nerdy maybe, but in practice it’s quite the opposite of distracting. Markdown keeps your hands on the keys. It keeps you typing. Screenwriters know the value of this. It’s the butt in the chair that gets the words on the page.
Unlike cumbersome word processing applications, text written in Markdown can be easily shared between computers, mobile phones, and people. It’s quickly becoming the writing standard for academics, scientists, writers, and many more. Websites like GitHub and reddit use Markdown to style their comments.
Formatting text in Markdown has a very gentle learning curve. It doesn’t do anything fancy like change the font size, color, or type. All you have control over is the display of the text-stuff like making things bold, creating headers, and organizing lists.
Plain text doesn’t change. Fifty years from now, you’ll still be able to open a plain text file. Until we all have squiggly tentacles on our faces and communicate telepathically, plain text will be a thing.
What about conversion software? Let’s say a tiny black hole swallows up every Markdown converter on the planet. You still have nice, clean plain text.
With Markdown, you don’t entrust your writing to 50,000 corporate shareholders, the companies they control and whatever features they “sunset” or add.
You control your destiny because, yes, you guessed it: It’s plain text.
Walk into a room of coders and ask what the best tools of their trade are—keyboards, text editing software, etc,—and you’re bound to start a war.
But in a world where programmers are fanatically divided, advocating fiercely for their favorite window managers and text editors, there’s one thing many engineers agree on. It’s called Solarized, and for four years, it’s reigned supreme as the color scheme of choice for many coders and the text they have to stare at all day.
After all, coders have, well, rather extreme thoughts about things like color schemes and text editors.
“This is close to people’s hearts,” Yale Spector, a senior developer for WeWork, told the Observer. “People take this shit real seriously.”
At this point, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why, why do these people care so much about the most minute details?” It’s because coders, who are also just very particular in nature, have no other tools of their trade but their computer and their mind.
“Text editors are where we live, where we spend so many hours in our day,” Mr. Spector said. “It’s so personal to us, it’s our home. When you get a house, you spend time making it comfortable, because you’re going to be there a long time.”
And, as Mr. Brocken puts it, it’s not just hot rodding—or tricking out your equipment for the sake of ostentatiousness. No, this is about building the perfect tool.
Developers may be overly opinionated, but they are also, by virtue of their work, obsessed with efficiency. For programmers who are building programs and designs right from their imagination, every additional advantage in their work environment is one less barrier between their mind and the machine.
“It may looks ridiculous to the outside observer, but it’s about eliminating that invisible barrier between you and the tool that you’re using,” Mr. Schoonover said. “It’s the carpenter making his own work bench.”
Briefly, plain text is a great format to use because (1) it can be read by any computer or device; (2) it’s future proof, since computers will always be able to read it; (3) it can be synced to all your devices; (4) it can be converted to virtually any format.
Plain text is ubiquitous. It works on every operating system, and on every mobile device, regardless of who makes it. A wide variety of apps can read it. You’ll never run into file compatibility errors. You can take what you write from one app to another without a thought.
This matters because the tech industry likes to remind us that nothing lasts forever. We see apps shut down all the time. They add in a subscription fee. They lock that one feature you want behind a paywall. It’s annoying, and if you’re invested in an app, whether it’s a notes app or a to-do app, you’re often forced to pay out the nose for a bunch of features you don’t want. Plain text doesn’t suffer this problem because it’s universally readable across platforms, not to mention a bedrock of well, computing as we know it.
Likewise, plain text will never change. Where an app might get updated with new features and a new user interface, plain text is pretty much always plain text. I will never open up an app to find a new design that I hate, or a new user experience I have to learn. Text editors may change, but there’ll always be another, and they’ll never all go subscription-only. This is really important to me. I use plain text every single day for simple tasks. I don’t need anything getting in the way of me capturing text as quickly as possible.
I love that with plain text the focus is on the words, not the formatting. I love that it’s portable and can be used anywhere and everywhere, in any piece of software that edits or displays words. I love how easy it is to create beautifully formatted documents when needed. Most of all, I love how fast it is. I simply work more efficiently since switching to plain text.
Authors and writers of all stripes can learn a lot about creating and managing words from computer programmers, beginning with an appreciation for the simple, durable efficiencies of plain text. Anybody running Unix, Linux, or BSD already knows all about text, because it’s the third prong of the Unix Tools Philosophy:
Write programs that do one thing and do it well;
Write programs that work together;
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
The geeks who made Unix nearly 40 years ago made plain text the universal interface because they believed in economy, simplicity, and reliability.
If Unix is the geek Gilgamesh epic, it’s a tale told in plain text.
Since its introduction in 2004, Markdown has enjoyed remarkable success. Markdown works for users for three key reasons. First, the markup instructions (in text) look similar to the markup that they represent; therefore, the cognitive burden to learn the syntax is low. Second, the primary arbiter of the syntax’s success is running code. The tool that converts the Markdown to a presentable format, and not a series of formal pronouncements by a standards body, is the basis for whether syntactic elements matter. Third, Markdown has become something of an Internet meme, in that Markdown gets received, reinterpreted, and reworked as additional communities encounter it. There are communities that are using Markdown for scholarly writing, for screenplays, and even for mathematical formulae. Clearly, a screenwriter has no use for specialized Markdown syntax for mathematicians; likewise, mathematicians do not need to identify characters or props in common ways. The overall gist is that all of these communities can take the common elements of Markdown (which are rooted in the common elements of HTML circa 2004) and build on them in ways that best fit their needs.”
I like and advocate plain text, but choose the tools that fit your flow. Many of my favorite authors use word processors.
This ad for Scrivener annoys me. I've written a dozen novels in Word BECAUSE I wanted to. It suits my workflow. Scrivener just doesn't. pic.twitter.com/5eeDJC3Azh
