Has the computer improved writing?
It certainly has increased the number of books published as well as the number of authors (both numbering these days in hundreds of thousands to over a million a year, depending on the estimate and exactly what is being estimated). Computers have made publishing so easy and inexpensive as to unleash the inner author in many a a citizen to whom it might otherwise never have occurred.
I haven’t seen any polls on the subject, but I imagine most writers now use a word processor because it makes writing and editing much easier and therefore better. I would say, as a longtime practitioner, that it has improved mine. I’m zooming along right now as I dash off this first draft; soon I intend to consult wikipedia on the stats of the digital self-publication era. (I give Jane Austen all the more credit for having flourished despite the constraints of writing with a pen.)
If, as I’m supposing, most writers would agree that computers have improved their writing, it must be that Writing has gotten better, right?
Certain areas of national life have improved: cars, beer, coffee. TVs. Pizza, perhaps.You could make a case that there are now a lot more high level TV series available to the consumer (to the point where, from what I read, supply is overwhelming demand.) But what about writing? Has the CWQ (national creative writing quotient) improved? I don’t know how you’d go about measuring this, but it’s not my impression.
Is contemporary life enhanced with more great novels or nonfiction books? Nobel or Mann Booker candidates? I don’t think so.
So there’s a seeming contradiction here, between the individual writer’s experience and belief that her own writing has improved as a result of using a computer. And the seeming reality that the national CWQ has not improved one bit.
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