Getting away from screens: On seeing the essay all at once

When I visited India in the summer of 2009, I stayed in an ashram for two weeks. I participated in a lot of meditations and saw the beauty of rural Puttaparthi. At one point, I saw students writing on massive slate tablets. They used chalk to write sentences. These gray slabs were about twice the size of a typical computer screen. As students gracefully wrote, I noticed how much longer, physically, their sentences were.

This trip to India had a profound impact on me for many personal reasons. It stripped me of many American-centric views I held. It reminded me, as a grocery store worker at that time, the ease with which Americans have access to food. The memory of the slate tablets, though, has a way of coming back to me professionally. The students in Puttaparthi had physically longer sentences because the tablets enabled their writing to be long.

As someone who studies writing technology and the teaching of writing for a living, I’m always struck by the constraints of tools we use to write. These constraints are easy to see when the pen runs out of ink or the pencil point breaks. When I collaborate with computer scientists, they use Overleaf. Overleaf is a program for inserting references easily into a document so it can compile fast while making pretty PDFs. I find the program wholly counteractive to the point that I feel dumb. Other writing tools make their constraints more difficult to see, such as the way the page and the chapter are certainly ideological tools that structure our thinking as writers. When I open up Microsoft Word or Google docs, I’ve naturalized scrolling up and down within the constraints of pages. Books have a similar feel to me: it makes sense to me to turn a page left to right (there! I just performed an ideology).

AI writing technologies, such as GPT, Gemini, or Llama, have their constraints, which aren’t really bad as they are boring and hollow. These things are programmed by people who love bullet points and distillable knowledge. This bullet-point ideology is part of a broader concern that I’ve had for a long time: the flattening of writing.

I mean this literally, not metaphorically. Writing gets dramatically flattened by screens.

Screens prevent a writer from seeing the entire document at once, a problem AI writing bots make worse because they produce so much wasteful text. When I write on a screen, the words are confined to a narrow, glowing window, forcing my attention into a small rectangle while the rest of the text recedes into darkness. I am reminded, too, that if the text isn’t on the screen, it doesn’t actually exist. That is, computers render the text on a screen, in the same way that in a videogame, the digital world must be rendered on a screen. If you are reading something on a screen and scroll away from it, it literally disappears. When writing on a screen, there is a loss of spatial awareness.

Last semester, I showed my students, who experienced most of their high school education primarily in the pandemic (and on screens) to organize their writing by printing out their writing and placing all 6-12 pages on a table at once. This is a very “old school” revision strategy. I told them, “Just look at it for a while. See what you notice.” Many of them remarked they had never seen an essay this way.

I have Anne Herrington to thank for this activity. In the spring of 2012, when struggling with a chapter in my dissertation, she said, “John, just get off the screen.” I went home to my mother’s house, placed a 37-page dissertation chapter on a kitchen table, and revised the organization until I figured it out.

I’ve started calling this lesson “seeing the essay.” Students have naturalized writing on a screen, often focusing on one paragraph or section at a time, to the point that they had never considered how their essay looked as a complete piece. By spreading out the pages and observing the layout, structure, and “flow,” (I hate that term but I still use) they were able to see their writing in a new way: as a whole.

“Seeing the essay” is about more than just revising one’s writing. It’s a way to understand the broader thought and movement of one’s writing, whether my own or my students’. This approach encourages students to move beyond the isolated, screen-based editing process and engage with their essays in a more holistic, tactile way. It’s a way, I hope, to get them to think about their writing less mechanically, like paragraphs and pages, and more conceptually, toward movements of thoughts.