Blinking cursors

For the third (and, for the moment, final) post about the naked evils of word processing, I will rant about the cursor. There it sits, every time you pause, doing the equivalent of drumming its fingers on the table in impatience at having to wait for you. It never gets tired, never sleeps, just sits there blinking and winking and somehow making you feel very inadequate and slow. So you rush into typing the first thing that comes into your head without thinking too clearly about it, and bingo, you've proved the cursor right - you really are stupid.

There, I've just done it.

Cut and paste

Another thing about word processing (I am hitting a trend here) is the facility to cut and paste, and again it is affecting the way we think and learn. We don't look things up, read around, understand and then express something, but instead we find the first answer in Google and then cut and paste it undigested into whatever we are writing, bypassing any need to absorb and understand it, let alone express it in our own words.

In higher education nowadays, students are taught how to avoid plagiarism by learning how to paraphrase instead of pasting unchanged text into their essays. Note that they are not encouraged to understand and absorb an idea, just taught how much they need to alter what they have found so that they don't get found out by their cut and paste.