We write differently when we use different writing tech, eg pen on paper, stick in sand, typing on a manual typewriter, tapping on the small screen of a phone, etc. Just how different, and what are the factors? Are we talking about the simultaneous processes of ‘generating a stream of ideas’ and ‘committing those ideas in letters words sentences and paragraphs’ and the physicality of ‘producing the marks that represent language on a substrate’ or ‘preserving ideas represented by linguistic symbols through digital codes in a memory location’?
Here is a tentative list of factors
- speed
- accuracy
- ability or ease of correcting mistakes
- congruency or fluency between thought (ideation) and action (preservation, or production)
- genre (and the associated conventions), formality (this does have to do with tech if the writing tech itself is the actual medium of consumption, but a text written can always be transferred into another medium or context)
- permanence
- ability to see part–whole relationships as one writes
- scale (visibility to the writer in terms of viewport size mainly but could also have something to do with consumption)
- time constraints (?)
- resources available for differentiating (emphasis for example) and structuring (separating thoughts into units in some sort of fashion) the text
- stake or risk involved (this has to do with ease of correction perhaps, but I’m thinking things like exams, forms, etc. where once one commits it’s done – the stake or risk might be high. Does this have to do with writing tech?)
- private or public, audience
(started writing in the bathroom with the Notes app on an iPhone SE, then finished in the Notes app on an iMac)