Basically the question. Between BA and Master’s I’ve written like 1000+ pages of essays and research papers. Some of my professors talked about using typewriters in their student days.
Have the size of assignments increased as technology has made formatting, typing, and the rest, all much easier?
Prior to typewriters, were students assigned papers or did academic work, especially in liberal arts, have a different format for assignments?
Comments
Yes, it’s always been a big part of academia. If you look at the online archives of universities and academic journals they go back more than a century.
lol they just did them by hand. I had a friend write his dissertation by hand because he writes better when he slows down.
Writing is thinking. We would handwrite stuff in MLA format and handwrite (or typewrite) sources for assignments. There’s a legitimate argument to be made that handwriting slows you down and forces you to think more. Obviously, it makes revising more difficult, which is why we (handwrote) outlines, and then drafts.
My parents and professors have described digging through the library files looking for a certain journal issue. Not even just writing but actually accessing publications seems like such a slower process.
I’m GenX, YMMV. When I started college after the Army, schools had computers but most people did not. A computer cost around 2k— about 4k today. Most of my “daily” assignments were hand written. We normally had a mid-term paper and a final paper. Those had to be typed and I normally used a typewriter so I could do it from my apartment. Most of my exams were hand written in blue books. Research wasn’t any harder, but it took longer just due to having to use card catalogs and digging through bound journals. You couldn’t leave the library with most of the material and you had to write your information on index cards or notebook.
By the time I started my master, most people had computers and online access to library databases. The volume of papers I had to write exploded. Three or four page papers for every class. The volume was more difficult but grading was easier, probably due to faculty not being able to read all the papers.
Yes, we used writing with our own hands from its invention until “smart” phones replaced brains. That’s literally what a “manuscript” is: a hand-written text. The printer would set it once the text was finalized. It made writing easy and proofreading hard, that’s why 19th-century books are so much longer than today.
Even more incredibly, we did math with our own brains.
Bruh you had medieval scribes transcribing massive books with illustrations by hand.
Sadly, sometimes, the process of handwriting then publishing a massive treatise on the evils of witchcraft went faster than our modern peer review process…
If you want the single most authoritative book on typesetting and academic discourse, I recommend Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Print Revolution in Early Modern Europe. She later wrote a version for general readers as The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
Blue book examinations and oral exams were much more prevalent, which is why classes are sometimes divided into lectures and recitation sections.
The vestages of the pre-print days are still around in words like manuscript. It’s literally “hand” writing. You can also see it in ancient monasteries and cloisters, where nuns and monks were employed in scriptoria as analog copy machines.
I’d also say that typewriters and personal computers may not have made writing any easier. It’s certainly faster, but every communication technology has its benefits and drawbacks. On my view, it’s hard to beat a good clay tablet and pointy stick. That technology hung on for a loooong time (even longer that vinyl).
One thing that has changed with technology is now there are many more footnotes/references. I suspect partly because they became easier to add with the invention of word processors and partly because of access to more works via internet
There were these things called card catalogues.
I wrote that much as an undergraduate. I drafted papers by hand in cursive and either typed them on my manual typewriter or paid someone to type them at the going rate of $1 per page.
There’s a weird relationship between the rise of technology and the decline in assignment quality in the UK. Our school system is more exam-focused, so essay-writing is not prioritised. Also, I hear students moan so much about how they hate reading, and I think schools are not developing a love for literature anymore. Perhaps this is harder to do given the allure of technology, but some schools don’t allow students to finish reading books in class. It’s odd. As a university tutor, I see intelligent students writing assignments that are noticeably worse than assignments written 10 years ago. I hate to say it, but the 90s generation hand-wrote essays and (I believe) had stronger literacy skills than this generation. My kids are currently in secondary school and I don’t see any improvements.
In terms of academics writing, I think we publish more crap now as its easy to churn out lots of papers and send them to rubbish journals. At the same time, books in my space are more concise, and this a blessing. I don’t see as many rambling books the size of bricks being published compared to decades ago (see Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Lefebvre etc). Technology allows for easier editing processes.
I’m a bit drunk so I’m going to stop writing now.