I need to talk about computers a little in order for the rest of this to make sense.

Computers are the background, the norm, and any time that someone of my generation writes, the medium that they choose has a symbolic significance derived from the relation of that medium to the computer. They need not be aware of this for it to be true; as Foss, Foss, and Trapp note, "actions to which rhetors do not consciously attend also can be interpreted symbolically" (3). So what do computers do about writing?

I'm typing this on a computer—in VIM, actually, a text editor. It's not the most modern piece of software; VIM was originally released in 1991. To put this in perspective, you can still run VIM in an 80×25-character terminal window, although I use a GUI version which is marginally prettier. The biggest difference between VIM and Microsoft Word (for example) is that VIM is designed to manipulate text and Word is designed to produce documents. Consequently VIM is much better at manipulating text. It's a useful crutch and I'm somewhat more productive when I use it, but the fact that I use it at all suggests some kind of underlying tension between the processes of composing and printing or composing and formatting.

Here is something incredible that computers do that we take completely for granted. The typeface that I would have used on this page if I could have is Garamond. It's unfortunately not that great onscreen, but it is very lovely in print, so I've picked one of the lovelier and more representative letters for you and blown it up to really visible size.

My computer (a netbook) and printer are the definition of unremarkable. I don't remember how much they cost—they're both more than three years old—but it can't have been more than $500 altogether. Yet here they do this astounding thing, not only printing in remarkable quality but doing it in a typeface designed by Claude Garamont sometime in the 1540s, well before (say) the King James Bible, and successively refined over the next four centuries. Maybe it's natural; Marshall McLuhan predicted that all technologies would incorporate their antecedents (Keedy 28). Isn't this what success looks like? The fusion of the old and the new, economically available to the masses?

So this is the context in which Putting Words on Paper occurs: we are in the future. There is less and less need to have physical documents, and when we do need them, computerized printing is superb and accessible. Now let me tell you about this time I met a typewriter.