An Ode to A User Friendly Pencil

Once, called away to an unanticipated school conference, I began drafting my short noticed speech with a yellow wooden pencil. Unfortunately this graphite loaded, eraser-tipped writing spear has become an alienated object as I readily admit my dependence on a new technology of writing. I found that I had become so used to composing virtual prose that I could no longer draft anything coherent directly onto a piece of paper. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t think of the words, but the deliberate physical effort of handwriting, crossing out, revising, cutting and pasting was much too tedious. The writing practices that I had been engaged in regularly since the age of four, now seemed to overwhelm and constrict me as I longed for the flexibility of digitized text. The computer is the latest development in writing technology; a promises to change literary practices for better. Bonnie Laing, the author of the essay “An Ode to the User-Friendly Pencil” is strongly against the boycotting pencils. Unfortunately, Laing’s argument that the pencil is superior to a computer is poorly demonstrated due to her biased diction towards analog writing instruments and ignorance of the current technologically driven era. Moreover, a major flaw noted within Laing’s writing is that she establishes an impractical prejudice for pencils. For instance, Laing attempts to persuade the reader using an irrational rhetorical question where she cautions “…can you imagine chewing on computer while balancing your cheque book” (15). Through this question, Laing attempts to justify the pencil’s usefulness; however, chewing any writing instrument is irrelevant since the function of neither the computer nor the pencil is to be chewed on. Additionally, the whimsical diction Laing produced within her essay such as “I’ve never had to boot a pencil” implies that Laing does not take the topic seriously enough to actually prove the superiority of pencils and would rather manipulate the readers’