From Pens to Speech: How Writing Tools Have Evolved

As technology improves, it’s faster and easier than ever to get words from brain to screen. We’ve progressed from dipping utensils in ink to using speech recognition software to dictate an entire Slate article. Here’s the evolution of writing tools at a glance.

Pens

Writers initially used reed or bamboo pens, feather quills, ink brushes, or dip pens, all of which were dipped into ink and then placed on papyrus or paper. These were notoriously messy, which prompted the creation of a reservoir pen in 1636, which was made from two quills. One quill was sealed with a cork and held the ink, which was squeezed through a tiny hole. In 1827, a patent was issued in France for a fountain pen with an ink chamber in the handle.

The first patent for a ballpoint pen, or a pen that has a tiny moving ball in a socket in the pen tip, was issued in 1888. Then came the invention of felt-tip pens in the 1960s, rollerball pens in the 1970s, and erasable pens in 1979.

Typewriters

In 1868, the first commercially successful typewriter was invented. Mark Twain typed the following letter to his brother in 1875:

The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don’t muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.

Initially, some people insisted that only two fingers be used to type while others said eight would be better and that typists should stare at the buttons, while still others argued it would be better to stare at the page. The QWERTY keyboard arrangement, on the other hand, was agreed upon by most and has barely changed since the invention of the typewriter.

Ever wonder why we have the QWERTY keyboard? It was arranged by Christopher Latham Sholes, inventor of the typewriter, who originally placed letters in two rows ordered alphabetically. The flaw in this system was that letters that were combined most often, such as “st” and “th,” were hit close together and caused the keyboard to jam. Thus, Sholes collaborated with Amos Densmore, an educator, and rearranged the keys according to their popularity to prevent jamming. This caused initial confusion for typists because they couldn’t find the keys, but it proved to make typing faster, because the keys wouldn’t jam.

Computers

Typewriters were widely used until computers advanced to the point that the average consumer could use them. In the late 1970s, Apple, Radio Shack, and Commodore began manufacturing keyboards for their computers. For a throwback, watch this Radio Shack commercial for the TRS-80.

Mobile Phones

Typing on mobile phones started with multi-tap approach on alphanumeric keys (1=abc, 2=def, and so on), as used by the 1989 Motorola MicroTAC 9800X. By 1993, however, we had the IBM Simon, the world’s first full QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen. The Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched in 1997 with the first QWERTY push-button keyboard and a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard. Now, many smartphone users only use QWERTY keyboards on-screen, although physical keyboards may be making a comeback.

Speech Recognition Software

Speech recognition first appeared in the 1950s to 1960s with Bell Laboratories’ “Audrey” system, which could recognize spoken digits. In the 1990s, Dragon released the first consumer-targeted speech recognition product, called Dragon Dictate, for a whopping $9,000. By the 2000s, speech recognition plateaued at about 80% accuracy, until very recently. In the last two to three years, speech recognition has improved thanks to Apple’s and Google’s speech-recognition capabilities. Typing by voice is now easier and faster than typing on screen; it’s also necessary as wearable devices like Google Glass and Apple Watch and products like Amazon fire TV come into the fray. The software parses your words from ambient noises, then analyzes the linguistic context to decipher what you’re probably saying.

The Future of Writing

Is handwriting becoming obsolete? In a study by Docmail, one-third of the 2,000 respondents said they hadn’t written anything by hand in the last forty-one days. Also, handwriting is receiving less emphasis in schools. Students in the U.S. are taking notes on laptops and cursive writing has been eliminated from the Common Core curriculum standards. American children have been required to know how to use a keyboard since 2013. Typing “allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: we want more time to think,” said Anne Trubek, associate professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. Do you think pen and paper will be replaced by speech recognition? Will handwriting ever be obsolete?

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A Complete Guide to Reevaluating Your 2017 Goals

You came into 2017 with high hopes.

Maybe you decided Stephen King isn’t the only writer who can mash out a few thousand words every day. If Chuck Palahniuk can hammer out an entire novel in under two months, you reasoned, then surely you’d be able to finish your opus by springtime. Journalists churn out many hundreds of words each day and presumably still see the sun once in awhile.

Admittedly, King’s advice to newcomers is to start by aiming for a thousand words a day, six days per week—while many other longtime pros get by doing less: working from an outline, novelist Colson Whitehead shoots for a thoroughly manageable eight pages a week. Zadie Smith has said just getting to 800 words “feels like a champion day.”

Alas, writing is hard.

Distractions abound, as do other, non-writerly responsibilities. Maybe you need to clear out your inbox before your head’s clear enough to tackle your intro. Or maybe it feels essential to transcribe every word of a research interview you taped before you’re ready to map out a structure. “My apartment in college was never cleaner than during exam week,” veteran reporter Michelle Willard jokes, “and it’s still true: I’ll clean my desk when I want to put off writing a story.”

Whatever resolutions or goals you’ve set for your writing this year, if they’re not working for you, that’s okay. Beating yourself up about it isn’t going to help, so the first step is forgiving yourself. There’s no guilt in being realistic, so long as you’re still writing. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you recalibrate your writing goals for 2017.

It’s okay to start small

Goals are helpful tools for getting writing done. But when they feel depressingly out of reach, they can become crippling and counterproductive. When possible, sometimes it’s wise to ease into your project rather than stress over the eventual scope of the end product.

For instance, a radio journalist covering the news of the day might be obliged to write two versions of the same story: one short, the other longer. By first knocking out a few quick sentences for an announcer to read, the reporter crosses the short version off her to-do list and now has a workable outline from which to build the longer spot.

The same lesson holds true whether you’re drafting a grant application or a novella: your word count will be low before it is high, and sometimes it’s practical to work that to your advantage. Be deliberate about it—make it part of your process—and you’ll surmount one of the greatest obstacles writers face: getting started.

Carve out time to work

Writerly concentration is often fragile. It can crumble with the buzz of a single text message and take several precious minutes to reassemble. If you’re juggling other responsibilities—whether you also have to run meetings this afternoon, or just run laundry—it’s easy to pretend you’ll cram in some writing during brief windows of downtime in between, but that rarely works out.

This is why many writers carve out specific hours to be alone with their work. Some put their phones in airplane mode; a few insist on going offline altogether, instead doing their writing with old-school pen and paper. King has advised against working in a room with a phone, TV, or even so much as an interesting window to look out of; for him, the point of working set hours is “to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

But your routine doesn’t have to be brutal, argues Tim Kreider—a committed writer of the four-to-five-hours-a-day school. Your sessions do, however, have to afford enough empty space for your creativity to breathe:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

If your writing objectives feel difficult to achieve, perhaps part of your revised goal should simply be scheduling a realistic window to work in, and sticking to that.

Keep giving yourself deadlines

Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” But in the end, you’re still aiming to get something finished. That’s where deadlines—even the self-imposed kind—come in handy.

For some writers, it’s the glorious inspiration of last-minute panic that helps shepherd their project across the finish line. For others, the ideal motivation might come from a kind of external pressure—the public declaration, perhaps via social media, that you’ll reach a given milestone by a certain time, for instance. Or the fear of letting someone down. Leveraging that anxiety so it spurs you onward might be all the more reason to let that person know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish, and when.

Phyllis Korkki, a New York Times editor whose book is subtitled “How to Complete Your Creative Project Even If You’re a Lazy, Self-Doubting Procrastinator Like Me,” has remarked that for some folks, making a friendly bet on your ability to hit a deadline, or even hiring a stranger to keep hectoring you through it, might factor into the fix.

Lastly, a deadline can help to enforce your requisite alone-time, lest this ritual feel overly selfish. Consider this entry from the glossary of Jonathan Kern’s Sound Reporting, a seminal guide for anyone writing for the ear:

Crash: To work on a deadline—often an imminent deadline. If you’re crashing, you don’t have time for socializing; phone calls to reporters or editors often begin with the question “Are you crashing?”—and if the answer is yes, the caller apologizes and hangs up.

Key takeaway: the person writing on deadline isn’t sorry; the person bothering them is.

Save editing for later

One other consideration worth keeping in mind as you march toward your new goal: writing is one task; editing is another. It’s often easier and more efficient to cull what’s worth keeping from an overlong draft than it is to try to prune out everything but the most scintillating bits as you go along.

The Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s initial draft of his iconic work “Like A Rolling Stone” ran to some 10 pages, for instance, before he was able to whittle it down to four verses. Barbara Kingsolver, the Pulitzer nominee and frequenter of bestseller lists, frames this point perhaps even more starkly:

I write a lot of material that I know I’ll throw away. It’s just part of the process. I have to write hundreds of pages before I get to page one.

Whatever your goal, big or small, go easy on yourself—and get started.

Fascinating New Languages

Despite all our smarts and scientific advancements, there is still a lot we don’t know about the phenomenon of human language. We don’t know what the first human language sounded like. We don’t know exactly where, how, or when it came to be. We may never be able to find out—there’s an overwhelming lack of data to work with. What we can say, however, is that once we figured out how to create language, we went ahead and created a bunch of them. And we’re still doing it today.

Where There’s a Need, There Is a Way

Two of the main senses for using language are speech, our ability to create sounds, and hearing, our ability to perceive sounds created by others. We can also give language a visual form by writing, but the visual element is important even in face-to-face communication. We send off and receive a number of non-verbal communication signs, such as facial expressions, postures, and gestures. A number of our fellow humans aren’t able to communicate with all three senses, but doesn’t stop them from finding effective ways of communication.

People who are deaf learn sign language—a language of hand gestures and signs that allows them to communicate with great fluency. But what happens in a community of deaf people who don’t have a sign language they can use to communicate? They come up with their own. When a group of deaf children in Nicaragua was taught to lip-read and use American Sign Language, they shunned lip-reading and quickly developed a sign language of their own—behind the backs of their teachers. The result was a completely new language, developed in the 1980s by Nicaraguan kids. And just like that, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, or ISN, was born.

People who can’t hear or see have an even bigger challenge—they can’t rely on signs and gestures. In the United States, people who are deaf and blind have been developing a sign language that is based on American Sign Language but has a tactile twist to it. A person speaking in Pro-Tactile ASL, which is what the new language is called, uses her own hands and arms as well as the hands and arms of the person she’s talking to create gestures and signs. It’s a contact language that allows speakers to communicate nuances such as nodding and other gestures.

Other Reasons to Invent a Language

Constructed languages have been created with different agendas, apart from the basic human need to communicate. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, the creator of arguably the best-known constructed language in the world, Esperanto, wanted to make a language that was easy to learn, could be used as an international second language, and could help overcome cultural misunderstandings. Robot Interaction Language, or ROILA, is a language currently under development at the Eindhoven University of Technology’s Department of Industrial Design. It is the first language created specially for use by talking robots. Loglan, created Dr. James Cooke Brown, is a language used by linguists to research linguistic relativity.

But new languages also pop up spontaneously when conditions are right. People living in Lajamanu, a small and isolated town in Australia, already had a heritage language they could speak, Walpiri. They also spoke both English and Kriol, an English-based creole. When parents spoke to their kids in a mixture of the three languages, the kids took the words they heard and married them with a syntax that wasn’t present in any of the three parent languages, creating a new native language for about 350 of Lajamanu’s residents. It’s spoken only by people who are around thirty-five years old.

Artistic Languages That Entertain

Fantasy settings invite us to create new languages. Alien cultures, alternative histories, dystopian futures, worlds of magic and swordplay—these settings are often very different from the world we live in. So, it only makes sense to, at least from time to time, populate these strange worlds with their own languages. Occasionally, you’ll get fantasy languages that really work (kind of). You might call them artistic languages, or artlangs.

If you’re a fan of the Star Trek franchise, you probably know there are Trekkers who can speak Klingon, a language created for a Star Trek movie by the American linguist Marc Okrand. If you’re familiar with the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, you’re probably aware of Quenya and Sindarin, two Elvish languages of Middle Earth. Na’vi, created by Dr. Paul Frommer, is what the big blue aliens speak in James Cameron’s movie Avatar. The Verdurian language was created by Mark Rosenfelder for a role-playing game, and it contains 400,000 words.

There’s no end to human inventiveness when it comes to language. What new languages do you speak?

Neat-O! Vintage Slang Words to Add to Your Modern Vocabulary

Language changes over time. The popularity of words, especially slang or words related to technology or trends, ebbs and flows. Some long-forgotten words, however, are worth resurrecting. If you’re looking to add a retro update to your vocabulary, here are a few words and phrases from the last hundred years to try out.

1920s: The cat’s meow: The best or greatest. Your iPhone case is the cat’s meow!

1960s: Bummer: a bad experience. I thought Taylor Swift’s concert was a bummer. She only played songs from her new album instead of her older hits.

1970s: Bad: Ironically, if something is “bad” it is really good, stylish, or cool. Did you see North West’s new Louis Vuitton sneakers? They’re totally bad!

1970s: Dig It: To understand or agree. What an insightful Ted Talk this is. I dig it.

1980s: Pie-hole: a slang term for mouth. I can’t wait to stuff my pie-hole with this vegan, gluten-free pizza!

Which slang words do you think people should start using again? Share your favorites in the comments!

Humanity’s Best Eggcorn Examples

When singers use backing tracks to sing less (or not at all) during a performance, they have to do what is called “lip singing”—mouthing the words without actually making sound. Old-timer’s disease is a terrible illness that affects people’s ability to think, remember, and control their behavior. A mute point is an issue that could be argued, but could also have very little consequence. To eardrop is to listen in on someone’s conversation.

What do lip singing, old-timer’s disease, mute points, and eardropping have in common? Not much, except that each of these phrases is incorrect. Lip singing is in fact lip syncing, mute points are moot points, old-timer’s disease is Alzheimer’s disease, and eardropping is eavesdropping. We call this particular type of erroneous word usage an eggcorn.

Eggcorns are called eggcorns because “eggcorn” itself is an eggcorn—a word that sounds similar to and has a meaning that sort of works in place of the original. In this case, the original is “acorn.” In September 2003, the linguist Mark Liberman posted an article to the blog Language Log. In the article, he described the case of a woman who used the term “eggcorn” instead of “acorn.” His fellow linguist Geoffrey Pullum noted that, if there’s no other name for this type of mistake, it might as well be called “eggcorn.” Lo and behold, seven years later, the term “eggcorn” found its way into The Oxford English Dictionary. Merriam-Webster recognized it five years after that.

To qualify as an eggcorn, the substituted sound must preserve at least some sense of the original word. Lip singing is an eggcorn because it involves people move their lips as if they were singing. Old-timer’s disease is an eggcorn because the disease mostly affects the elderly. There are a few types of errors related to eggcorns—a mondegreen is almost like an eggcorn, but it involves misconstruing the lyrics of a song or other type of performance. A malapropism also features a similar substitution of sounds, but it results in a word or phrase that doesn’t make sense within the context.

However, eggcorns, just like malapropisms and mondegreens, have an abundant comedic potential. Case in point: the character Virginia, played by Martha Plimpton in the television show Raising Hope. Virginia was a very potent distributor of malapropisms, eggcorns, and other errors, linguistic or otherwise. She gave the world Obama-Car, an affordable car insurance program devised by President Obama. She also gave us self-refilling prophecies, infusiating into other people’s lives, and many other mistakes that made her a great character and made us laugh.

But if you think about it, eggcorns are often surprisingly witty as well. If you hear a word imperfectly, you have to make an educated guess in order to pronounce it yourself. Sometimes you’re right, but sometimes you come up with another word that sounds almost the same and seems to describe the same thing as the original word. All of this happens under the hood, without you even knowing it’s happening, and it demonstrates how great and flexible human brains are. And in a doggie-dog world, we need to be witty.

What are your favorite eggcorns? Let us know in the comments!