On the Curse of the Cursor

And How to Avoid It

I’m going to limit what I say here to a single topic: The Sentence.

I could just as well talk about the novel as a whole or the page as an entity, but The Sentence will allow me to deal with the issue of wordprocessed prose, and to anatomize what I call the Curse of the Cursor.

As you probably already know, I teach the M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Southampton. Almost all my students work entirely on computers, laptop or desktop. Some do drafts on their phones.

When I print out a paper copy of their stories to read before a class, it may be the first time it has existed in a physical rather than an electronic form.

And I believe I can tell, with some accuracy, how any text has been created. Whether it has always existed on a computer or whether the writer did a first draft by hand or whether they work mainly with pen and paper, only typing up towards the ultimate draft.

How can I tell?

There are some sentences which, to me, stand out very clearly as wordprocessed.

When writers first started using typewriters, way back in the twentieth century, it was thought that it would alter the prose they produced. And I think, in some subtle ways, it did.

There is a different rhythm to flowing ink than there is to clattering metal. But what was consistent between handwritten prose and typewritten prose is that, for each new draft that is required, every sentence of every draft had to be physically redone —reinscribed, retyped.

In other words, the sentences passed again and again through the writer’s mind, their inner ear, and through the writer’s body, their forearms, wrists and fingertips and then their their pen, pencil or keyboard.

Wordprocessing (such an old-fashioned sounding word now) — writing on a laptop removes the need for this physicalised re- and re-re-doing.

A laptop sentence may be altered many times without ever being physically redone, start to finish, as a whole.

And this is where The Curse of the Cursor can strike.

Because the way these wordprocessed sentences are altered is by the writer reading them through on screen, then deciding they want to change something, then trackpadding their cursor to the area of the screen on which they want to focus.

At its worst, this leads to sentences that accumulate material through the now-over-here, now-over-there opening points the cursor creates — sentences that can start to lose their propulsive and rhythmic sense.

Contributing to this is the clicky, semi-silence in which such prose is created.

The Curse of the Cursor would be mitigated slightly were the writer to read aloud what they had just written every time they made an alteration — read it aloud, and the sentences immediately before and after.

Without this, sentences can come into existence that give no sense of rhythmic or musical or conceptual cohesion.

These wordprocessed sentences are, instead, a generalized flow of meaning — as long as what the writer wants to say is in the paragraph somewhere, that’ll do.

Here’s a very old-fashioned analogy: I think good sentences by any prose writer can be tested like wineglasses: tap them with your fingernail and the cracked ones go tink!, the uncracked ones go ting! — and they go ting! because they have start-to-finish integrity.

They have a sense of themselves as sentences, and a take on what a sentence can achieve. They aren’t made of bits opportunistically inserted into un-listened-to streams of this-is-what-I-want-to-say.

Writing suffering the Curse of the Cursor is entirely an issue of technology — without computers of the sort we have, it would not arise.

How do I deal with it, practically, as a teacher?

I advise my students physically to go through their work, repeatedly physically go through their sentences.

If their prose suffers particularly badly from The Curse of the Cursor, I advise them to write all their first drafts by hand — however much of a pain they might find this.

When they plead that their handwriting isn’t legible to them, I suggest that they do the reading aloud thing at least once per draft.

Listen to yourself reading what you’ve written aloud. If you stumble, mark that place in the text. Don’t try to fix it right then — keep going. But then go back to see what it is that’s snagging you. Quite possibly, it’s a point in the text where the Cursed Cursor hovered, landed, prised apart a punchy sentence and added some useful stuff. Maybe that stuff needs to be there, but maybe it deserves its own complete sentence. Or maybe something else in the sentence has to disappear in order to fix the rhythm or secure the sense.

Only under very special circumstances of intended fragmentation should a sentence read as if it’s been made of separate bits. Even if long, it needs to be an elegantly unique solution to a question of expression.

I tell my students, There are no shortcuts, and I hope they listen.

You may not put in the work of physically re-doing this time round, but either you or your agent or your editor will insist upon it before the work is finished.

In my view, that’s what finished means. Can’t easily be taken apart, because whole.

The Curse must not be passed on to the reader.

If it is, they may well utter that accursed sentence, I liked the story, but I didn’t think it was very well written.

A version of this, slightly more grumpy, appeared somewhere else, at some point in the past.

Image: Wikimedia commons.