Teaching writing in a digital age: The struggle is real - Joe Bennett

"My head began to boil. I swore and rose from my desk to go on a stomping walk around the house." Photo / 123rf

OPINION

I’m soon to teach a little writing course. Preparation for such a thing used to be easy.

I would go to my bookshelves, pick the books I wanted to use as models and pin them flat on the glass of the photocopier while the blinding light passed under them.

Then I’d cut the relevant passages out of the photocopies and paste them onto a single page, and make a photocopy of that page for each member of the class. Job done, to the envy of every medieval monk in his scriptorium with his inks and his quills and his cold chapped hands.

(So skilled was I at this, that when the photocopier jammed I would even open the door on its innards and rootle for the scrunched-up sheet of paper, undeterred by the signs on hot surfaces that said Caution Hot Surface in red capital letters. When I got burned, I wore the scars with pride, wounds suffered for the cause of literacy.)

But now all that is as outdated as the medieval monk. Today I am expected to assemble my teaching material in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. Oh god.

I’ve seen a few PowerPoint presentations and so have you. And how much do you now recall of what you saw, with all its natty slides and little animations? Precisely. But I had no choice. So I went on line.

And even there, in that phrase ‘on line’, we have the start of a problem. I am familiar with lines. They’re punishment for naughty boys, or bits of geometry, or metal things for trains to run on. But there’s no line that I’m aware of in ‘on line.’ The word has been hijacked, used to mean something it never previously meant.

Anyway, I asked Google how to make a PowerPoint presentation and up came a million answers in a nanosecond and I clicked the top one, as you do, and was immediately flummoxed by the language.

It advised me to ‘start by pinning PowerPoint to the taskbar.’ Now I know what a pin is. I’ve performed tasks. I’ve been in a few bars.

But I had no idea at all what the instruction meant. So I Googled ‘taskbar’ and found out what that is, but then I couldn’t find the PowerPoint thingy that I was meant to pin to it, all of which futility took me longer than it would have taken a monk to write out my material by hand. My head began to boil. I swore and rose from my desk to go on a stomping walk around the house. Then I rang Dave.

Dave is used to my calls. When I am struggling with the language of technology he acts as an interpreter.

He soon found PowerPoint for me and, following his instructions, I pinned it where it needed to be pinned (though knowing, even as I did so, that five minutes later I wouldn’t be able to do it again). He briefed me on how to load material onto pages, found an online manual to help and then rang off because he had to go and earn a living. Immediately I was all at sea again. In search of dry land I went to the manual, though not with any hope. But what I found there seemed to me to go to the heart of the matter.

The manual, which spoke in a grating young American voice, insisted I use lots of visual gimmicks on my slides - animations, cartoons, photos. Because, and I quote, ‘if you put in lots of text you will drive people crazy.’

And there you have it in one wee sentence. The written word, the invention that has fuelled all intellectual and social progress for the last couple of thousand years, is now considered off-putting. What we want instead is pretty pictures.

As little kids we gawp at picture books. Then as we grow we learn to read. But now technology is reversing this process.

Not content with hijacking the language for its own purposes, it is steering us away from using language at all, back towards a baby world of moving images, a world of Instagram and Trump and booklessness.

So to teach a writing course today feels like a subversive act. I shall go to it with a will.