Credit: Dan Blomberg/COSMOS
In May last year, I lost my H and my 8. The H flew off its prong, whizzing past my head and landing on the far side of the office. I found it after a 20-minute search, lying like a forsaken metal crumb next to the waste bin.
The 8 edged more slowly upwards - in grim defiance of gravity - eventually falling off into the guts of the typewriter, mysteriously disappearing forever. The kindly Korean repairman, who actually retired in the year 2003 and must be the last person in Sydney (perhaps Australia) who fixes these mechanical relics, had to raid one of the models he has at home to provide a replacement.
He had been on holiday, so I spent two months typing radio scripts and filling in missing Hs and 8s with a pen. It is remarkable how many Hs there are in the average sentence.
I have been using a mechanical Olivetti typewriter to compose my radio and television scripts since 1972. Instead of fresh paper, I insert the backsides of press releases (mostly spam) and memos from ABC management (all spam!). So my word-processing costs to the Australian taxpayer are therefore about A$2.50 per annum - for a new typewriter ribbon.
Many of us prefer to avoid computers when writing. Stephen Jay Gould told me he always used a 1927 stand-up typing machine for which he had a store of ribbons sufficient to last the rest of his now-shortened life. Could he possibly have pounded out that final colossal 1,500-page breeze block about the structure of evolutionary theory on that poor, benighted contraption?
More recently, Colleen McCullough told me she still uses electric typewriters. Before she turned to the golfball kind of typewriter, she needed six of the typebar types on standby. Each would be hammered for two-hour stretches and became so hot it threatened to seize up; then the next, cold one was plugged in. A big Roman novel, written twice, required her to pound out a million or so words.
Former Australian Science Minister Barry Jones, like me, is also a mechanical man. So was poet Ted Hughes. We relish being forced to choose our words with extra care. Corrections are laborious on the page. We tell ourselves we are inviting discipline, enforced precision. We are fighting off the deadly enemy: prolixity. Such is the hubris.
Hughes, a poet-laureate and husband of Sylvia Plath, once remarked how much these new-fangled machines affected his style. When young, he used to write summaries of plays or novels for a film company. Then at 25, he turned from fountain pen directly to typewriter. "I realised instantly that my sentences became three times as long, much longer. My subordinate clauses flowered and multiplied and ramified away down the length of the page …"
Ted Hughes had been a judge for a children's writing competition for more than three decades. Entries used to be no more than a page or two. "But in the early 1980s, we suddenly began to get 70- and 80-page works. These were usually space fiction, always very inventive and always extraordinarily fluent - a definite impression of a command of words and prose but, without exception, strangely boring. It was almost impossible to read them through."
Word processors had arrived.
On the screen everything looks so neat and orderly, just right. So why do you not-so-easily see infelicities which scream "WRONG!" as you do when you read them later on paper? Have we so quickly slid into an age of unrestrained communication, message manufacture, in which volume is mistaken for content?
In Tomorrow's People, Susan Greenfield notes that, already, three quarters of American high-school students "prefer researching on the Internet to using reference books" but that "the arrival of computers in the classroom has not been accompanied by any statistically significant improvement in pupils' academic achievement."
I wonder what all that texting will do for their writing, other than giving then thumbs the size of bananas. In 1993, science fiction writer Samuel Delainey decided to see what the 23rd Psalm would look like in 2093 based on trends forced by electronic communication habits. How would the pithy, almost anorexic word-use of our hasty times change the florid language of the past? The result is shown below in "2093"; compare it with the original version in the verses that follow it.
2093
I have a supervisor
I need nothing more.
My sleeping, my eating, my drinking
Is observed and controlled.
Even if threatened by death,
I need not fear.
I need not think.
Controls and aids are all around me.
I am fed.
My enemies starve while they watch me eat.
My head is rubbed like a pet!!
My water dish is full to overflowing.
My whole life I will frisk about the palace!!
St James's Bible
The Lord's my shepherd, I shall not want
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul, He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
For His name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil:
For thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff
They comfort me.
Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my
Life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Now look again at that first effort: not too many timeless phrases promising to live forever in our language! But just dandy as a terse summary.
One thing I didn't mention about the way I prepare scripts is that I edit and play sounds at the same time on a computer. In fact, I've written five books using computers. I turned to them for two reasons. First, no publisher accepts kilos of paper pages from any but the most eminent authors (like Colleen).
Secondly, I was shown by a dear old friend, the late Mungo McCallum Snr, how to use these overcomplicated devices, which I complained could calculate your trajectory to Mars at the same time as doing the budget for the European Union, when all you wanted from it was clean text.
"Treat it like the typewriter in a coroner's court, dear boy," advised Mungo, "ignore the rest." And I did.
A machine costing hundreds, even thousands of dollars, just to write words. And Americans, according to The Economist, throw away 133,000 computers a day. That's what hurts most.
Robyn Williams has been the host of The Science Show on ABC Radio National since it was first broadcast on 23 August 1975. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, he is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Cosmos.
