I know this may be hard to believe, but I went to school before the age of computers. Well, let me correct that a bit. I don’t need to sound older than I am. Rather, I went to school before desktop computers become the norm.
Oh, how I wished I had had a Mac or even a PC back in my high school or college years. I was raised on an old Smith Corona. I see them in antique stores these days. They are relics from the past, yet have become hip again with the younger crowd who find it oddly exhilarating to pound away on the manual keys.
I spent endless hours with blackened hands, trying to reuse the ribbon one more time. And more than one brilliant idea came to a crashing halt when the keys stuck, my hands flying so fast that they were such a blur of brilliance that my poor old typewriter couldn’t keep up.
In high school, one of the smartest things I ever did was take a class from Dr. Kreugel called Research Seminar. We spent an entire semester writing just two term papers. Yes, it was term papers in slow motion. We painstakingly learned all the steps one at a time – how to do accurate research, vetting information, comparing resources, taking copious notes on index cards, writing the rough draft, making proper attribution, footnoting, bibliographies – the works.
As I noted, this was in the days before personal computers. We did everything the old fashioned way. For example, we took notes on the note cards in pencil, so we could easily fix errors in our transcription. When it came time to write our rough draft, we did it in long hand, again in pencil, taping the cards into the pages as we went to back up our arguments and statements.
At each step along the way, we would turn in our work to Dr. Kreugel who would grade us. This is why it took eight weeks to write a term paper. Every step was reviewed, tested, analyzed and graded.
It would have been so much faster on a PC, though I’m not sure that is really true. In Word, I can torture over a single word or tap into an online thesaurus to find an alternate. I can then push a button, let it check my grammar and then end up disagreeing with a large part of its recommendations because Word doesn’t follow the rules I’ve come to like.
I don’t recall what both papers were about. I know the one was about the B-1 bomber because I used it again in college.
And that’s where all this plodding work came in handy. For graduation, my parents bought me a new typewriter – an electric from Sears with removable cartridges. No longer did I have to have an ever present bottle of whiteout with me. One of the cartridges was a corrector ribbon.
What a technological marvel. It was a savior in college. Term papers are a way of life in college and it wasn’t uncommon for me to have several due at the same time, particularly as the end of the quarter would draw near and my tendency to procrastinate caused a bottleneck in the last couple weeks.
It was then that all that Dr. Kreugel’s brilliance in teaching kicked in. I was a term paper writing marvel. I could do an entire 20 page paper in about three days. One day to do the research, one day to write out the draft, and the last day to type it out on my new fangled typewriter.
Yes, I did it just like I was taught. I did the draft in long hand, taping in the index cards. There’s a reason for that, by the way. Taping the cards into the draft does several things. First, it allows you to keep track of the proper reference as each card is numbered and matched to a running list of resources. Second, you don’t re-enter often long passages of attributed text, and third, while editing you can simply lift a card off the page and move it elsewhere if you find it’s not really supporting your argument.
These days, of course, we have the wonders of copy and paste. It doesn’t really make attribution any easier, at least on the projects I have had to work on. That’s because there seems to be no standard any longer. For example, the medical world likes to use the APA standards for attribution and footnoting. It’s a lot different from the one I learned in high school. For the longest time I even had Dr. Kreugel’s cheat sheet next to me, with all the various footnoting and bibliography forms: newspapers, periodicals, television shows, etc. It was mimeographed no less. I must have used it for the next 10 years as I moved from high school to college to the working world.
Suffice it to say, all those lessons learned allowed me to nail all my term papers. While I have been blessed with the gift of writing, Dr. Kreugel taught me to color inside the lines when it was necessary. Without the disciplines I learned in her class, I would have been all over the board when it came to term papers.
My crowning achievement came in Bible as Literature. Our final was a term paper analyzing a book from the Bible. I was assigned Micah. I was shocked at my grade, a 98. When I got the paper back I had to go up to the professor’s office. I sheepishly knocked on his door and asked if it was out of 100. He looked at me queerly and said, “Yes, of course.”
I can thank Dr. Kreugel for the 98. I can thank my old Sears typewriter for the two points I didn’t get. My corrector cartridge had run its course towards the end of the paper and I had to improvise, rewinding it a bit and hoping that the letters I tried to correct didn’t fall into the path of the letters already stamped on the cartridge. If only I had a Mac. I would have totally nailed that paper.
In the Emerald City, torturing over every single word, just as I always have,
– Robb