Quite an interesting read of the history of writing and be therefor reading also. Not necessarily memorable but interesting. ( )

A Better Pencil spends two-thirds of its brief length being an utterly fascinating book, then veers—abruptly and without warning—into being a dull, derivative, and outdated one. Its original, interesting self briefly reemerges in the conclusion: a reminder of lost opportunities that intensifies, rather than diminishes, the sense of loss.

The majority of the book is an argument that the technology with which we write has always affected the way we write. Baron makes the point by considering first the pencil (and, more briefly, the pen), then the typewriter, next the dedicated word processor, and finally the word-processing program. It’s a deceptively simple argument, but a crucially important one. As technologies—the machines becoming familiar, and the use of them routine—we collectively forget that they are technologies that were, once, as revolutionary and disruptive as networked computers are today. We assume that the use of them represents some kind of eternal, natural norm, from which newer devices are a destructive, worrisome departure. Baron, as his title hints, positions computers as the latest in a long series of tools-for-writing, each of which was met, in its day, with both delight and frustration.

The ways in which computers (re)shape the way we write are numerous, complex, and interrelated. They make plagiarism infinitely easier to commit, but also infinitely easier to detect. They decrease (thanks to automated spelling checkers) the frequency of outright misspellings, but increase (thanks to autocorrect and autosuggest features) the frequency of wrong-word errors. They merge the once-separate processes of writing and typesetting into a single act, which delights some users and appalls others. Baron could easily have spent the last third of the book exploring them, and related issues (like the rise of the first generation in history that routinely communicates through the written word). Unfortunately, rather than maintain his productively narrow focus on how individuals write, Baron expands his examination to consider the venues in which people write, and the reasons why they write there.

The last third of A Better Pencil thus plunges into the depths of MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, and blogs, and engages a whole new set of issues: online privacy, hate speech, the reliability of crowd-sourced information, and many more. These are important issues, but they’re different issues—where and why people write rather than how they write—than the ones that the first two-thirds of the book provides the historical context for. Baron’s handing of them comes across, as a result, as brief, superficial, and (given that entire books have been written about them) superfluous. His decision to embrace them also makes the book feel conspicuously dated. “How” people write has changed relatively little as computers have morphed into portable, always-connected devices, but “where” and “why” they write have changed enormously. Engaging with the “where” and “why” questions pins A Better Pencil to a specific, rapidly receding moment in time—one where smart phones were still new, and MySpace was still relevant—in a way that sticking to “how” questions never would have. ( )

While not particularly dry, one can't help but wonder if the author is technologically-challenged, or if he really thought it was necessary to explain how how things work on such laymen's terms. Is the target audience of this book really going to need a description of what an Instant Message is? ( )