An early memory of learning to write

In the eighth grade I learned how to really write.

Mrs. Dean was our middle school newspaper adviser and journalism teacher. I generally excelled at writing, often turning in first drafts and receiving high marks. Mrs. Dean challenged all that by holding me accountable for real revision and thinking on paper.

I can’t remember the exact topic, but I remember one occasion in which I really struggled with a particular reporting assignment. I had conducted several interviews and had cobbled together a long rambling mess of a news story that was unsuitable for publication. At Mrs. Dean’s behest I had attempted multiple rewrites, but I just wasn’t “getting it.”

Finally, a few days before deadline, Mrs. Dean greeted me one afternoon with a copy of my article, which she had enlarged on the school photocopier. I then watched as she cut up my writing, sentence by sentence, until all that lay before me on the desk was a pile of strips.

She said, “They have computers now that will do this for you [it was 1984], but we’re going to be our own word processor.” We then commenced to moving the strips around, adding new sentences and transitions where needed, and deleting other sentences altogether.

In retrospect, I think Mrs. Dean was referring to one of the earliest word processing programs that ran on the old Apple IIe computers, which were just coming out on the market. At the time, I had no idea what she was talking about, but her words came rushing back to me when, as a freshman in college, I sat for the first time in an Apple computer lab and wrote my first-ever essay with word-processing software.

Mrs. Dean’s hands-on exercise made the abstract concept of revision plainly visible to me. This experience not only changed my attitude toward writing, but I believe it served as an essential metaphor that prepared me to take up computer literacies later in life. The memory of moving those strips of paper around on the desktop in Mrs. Dean’s classroom bridged my eventual transition from traditional pencil-and-paper composing to the new world of digital word processing.

An early memory of learning to write