Writing As a Spectator Sport

Over at the Atlantic, James Somers reports on software called Etherpad that adds a temporal dimension to writing, tracking every keystroke and allowing users to "play back" the entire writing process. As Somers points out, that functionality--despite the fact that the Etherpad software is more or less defunct--holds a lot of promise for academia, both as a way to track writers' revisions over time and as a way to make sure that students are doing their own work.

I'm sort of partial to the idea that the reason we have rough drafts is so that no one has to see them, not so that everyone will have access to them forever--so I also have my doubts about this catching on among literary types. But it would definitely be useful for academic integrity, for tutoring, and--if actual literary writers used it--as a tool for understanding the cognitive process of writing at a level of granularity that prior technologies never allowed us to. After all, with pen and ink, typewriters, and computer files, we could only see drafts that the writers officially considered finished drafts, not the writing as it was constructed at a word-by-word level.

I, for one, was shocked to see the sketchy, outlinish way that Somers himself writes, which he shares here via the open-source descendant of the original product. I don't write my posts that way--they just come out in the first draft the way that they come out, and then I cut/paste/delete as necessary--but that is, actually, how I write research papers, which makes me wonder if we approach writing differently based on how we generically categorize it: "professional/research" vs. "casual/interpersonal".

Anyway, check it out.