Digital Literacy and my Life
While I was writing a paper for a class not even a week ago, my mother came in the room and was astonished by how fast I was typing. Normally I pay very little attention to how fast I’m typing; I mostly just watch the words form on the screen rather than think about my fingers moving. When she pointed it out, I had to sit back and look at the keyboard; it’s something I learned over time and I used to be really impressed with it at first. However it became second nature and it went to the back of my mind. I started to type more rather than write all of my work on paper about five years ago when my carpal tunnel started to really affect my writing. I never even thought about how I went from writing by hand to the digital tools I use now.
Thinking back to when I first learned to read and write in kindergarten, sitting at a square table with five other kids, each of us had a large red flip book. Inside were the letters of the alphabet, but there was only one letter per line, capitalized and lowercase. You had to write it five times over in upper and lower case, then you could move onto the next letter. Once you were done with that, you had to write simple words like, ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘hat’, and so on, over and over. I recall that you had to say the word aloud as you wrote it, say each letter and then the whole word. My parents would have me do my homework, writing the words and reading them aloud, but most of my work and learning was done at school. My parents thought that it was the schools job to teach me; they just wanted to help push me in the right direction. Now, don’t get me wrong; if I had questions about things, my parents would answer them, and they taught me how to speak the words before I was writing them, so they developed my verbal literacy more, but my writing and reading literacy was the teachers and schools developing work.
My parents were notoriously bad spellers in my family and didn’t teach me to write very often because of it. My father was actually held back in first grade because of his spelling struggles, so my parents thought it was better to learn from professionals rather than struggling amateurs. Even with the help of my teachers, spelling has always been such a difficult thing for me to do. I remember sitting at our kitchen table at home for hours upon hours writing my spelling words over and over from anywhere of ten to twenty-five times. My parents would give me spelling tests when they knew I had one coming up in school, and if I didn’t spell the word right I wrote it five times again until I got it right. Just like when they taught me to read, I had to read one book before bed every night; normally, that book would be a Dr. Seuss book picked out by my mother. We would read that same book every night until I could get all the words correct while reading them. I can still remember breaking down into tears reading ‘One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish’. Since I learned to read and spell by phonics, so if the words didn’t sound how it looked, or didn’t spell how it looked I got frustrated and normally got it wrong. To this day, I still have the most trouble reading names.
Moments like these were how I learned to write, but it wasn’t even close to when I realized that I was a writer. It wasn’t until I was a bit older when my mother gave me a diary. My mother was in the military my whole life, so we had to move around a lot. That meant starting new schools, making new friends, which the diary was supposed to be used to record how I felt about all of it. That’s when I really developed my writing style and skill. I used it to explain how I was feeling that day, what happened during the day, just normal childish things that I didn’t realize then where helping me develop into who I am now. Though a huge use of the diary came when I was around 10; my grandfather passed away and it was the first death I ever experienced. I wrote about that for the next six months and still keep those passages today. I think that was one of the hardest things I ever went through; it was also the first time I saw my father cry. I didn’t know how to voice my thoughts, so I wrote. I can still remember crying into that diary and smudging the pages as I recalled all my happy memories with my grandfather. my favorite was seeing my grandfather sit at the computer while he burned my favorite games onto a CD and he pulled me onto his lap to try and show me and explain to me what he was doing. Of course I was very little at the time, maybe seven or eight, so I didn’t actually know what he was talking about, but it left an impression, a memory that I cherish so greatly today. I didn’t realize it then but as I write about it now I realize that diary itself is a memory; it was where I kept all my own memories, locked away tight with a lock and a key that only I know where it is. I can open that lock and relive those memories through my words, and even if I let someone else read them, they might not feel how I felt at that time, but it brings it back to me in a rush. I feel that way again; even as I sit here now thinking of the great memories I wrote in that book about my grandfather, my eyes are filling with tears. That diary let me to explain how I felt and actually became a coping method, which I used even later when I was around 11 or 12 and my mother was away during the week, but would come home on the weekend. We lived in Mississippi and the military base she worked on was two hours away in Louisiana. She didn’t want to move us from our home so she stayed on base over there during the week. Those three years that followed were rough for me; I had to raise my sister since my father took it hard not having my mother, and I wrote in that diary every single day. Sometimes, it was how school went, and other times it was how I despised being left alone to raise my sister when I was a child myself. My writing became more about anger, but it would make me feel better. The more I wrote, the faster I wrote. I’d write for a few hours without realizing any time had passed at all! Before I knew it, I had written on quite a few pages when I was finished venting. It got to a point where I couldn’t go a day without writing in that diary, but then I stopped, or moreover; I evolved from writing on paper, to writing on a screen.
Without realizing it, that little diary opened up a whole world of writing for me. I soon started to write short stories and poems, even daring to write a long fiction book that I wanted to split into three different parts. That was when I really started to develop my digital writing. The technologies I used up to that point where pen’s and paper, a typewriter, and eventually a computer. Think of this next segment as a timeline. It started off with a pencil, where I learned what the alphabet was, how to write it, memorizing the motions so I could be literate. Then came the typewriter; I remember sitting at my mother’s work, there was typewriter no one really used and I was able to sit at the desk and peck away at the keys. I normally just pressed the keys, not in any order or formation to actually formulate a word that could be coherent enough to be called English. But I did peck at the keys to get to know where they were, seeing how they looked in perfect ink on a page. It was more than a little exciting; listening to the typewriter as it clicked away was one of the most exciting moments as a writer. As strange as it is, it gives sound to the letters; it’s different than the sound of lead against a piece of paper, it gives actual clicks that eventually become soothing. Though then we get to the computer; when you eventually stop pecking, the smooth clicking of the keys becomes soothing, and the easy backspace the typewriter lacked becomes advantageous. I do remember asking my teacher if I could type up my assignment on a typewriter; she, of course, declined because she said it would take too long with no way to erase a mistake, and she would take off a point for each mistake. So the computer became a huge impact on my life. But that typewriter had me hooked; I never got to write anything special on it, but I knew it was the first thing I would run to as soon as we walked into my mother’s office. It’s like a step ladder if you think of it, with pen and paper at the bottom, the next step up is a typewriter, then a computer.
The computer was almost a godsend. We only had one at my house. the games I spoke of before, that my grandfather burned onto a CD, they were word games and math games that helped me to learn the keyboard and where all the letters were. When I lived in Mississippi, we were required to take a typing class in 8th grade that taught you where the keys were as well as had you type sentences as fast as you could with the least amount of errors. I excelled in that class and had the highest WPM (Words Per Minute) in my school thanks to the games I grew up with on the computer. I went on to take two more typing classes in 9th grade, and once we upgraded from dialup internet, I was able to get on the computer more and practice my typing on kid friendly websites like Neopets. As I grew older, this lead me onto more sites I could develop my writing, blogs here and there that I could exchange my ideas with others and expand on them. Even simple things like tumblr and facebook, so it’s interactive social media. At this current time, with all the classes and experience, I have a WPM of 90 with 3 errors, something I’ve learned to take pride in. Because watching people doing the ‘hunt and peck’ method on the keyboard is amusing. I dove into digital writing so much that it became a way out of this world. It also was something I was good at, not just how fast I could move my fingers across the keyboard, but my writing actually improved. It was my relaxation time, where I could sit back and enjoy the short stories I wrote with friends, or the ideas we bounced around to get our creative juices flowing. When I started to write long stories, I found myself getting writers block more than a few times. Either I would lose interest in the topic or become stuck in a position where I didn’t know how I would like to continue the story. That’s where a lot of the blogs and friends I’d enjoyed making online came into play. Sometimes I found it the best just to write about nonsense, to where me and a friend would role play two of my characters bantering back and forth to see if that could give me an idea where I could go from there.
Before I even realized it, I had a hobby, but not one that was just pen and paper, but digital as well. Either bantering over email with friends, on a small blog site, or even in a saved Word document, I had slowly developed my writing style mostly on the computer without even realizing it. While I spoke with my friends I had a world of my own that I placed my characters in. Though it was only in my head, while I could draw pieces of it out on paper, it just wasn’t the same as when I described it. I wanted to bring this world to life in not only my mind but in others, to paint in detail a picture of a place they had never been. That was when I thought of myself as an Elaborate writer. My characters aren’t one dimensional, nor is the world I created for them. It’s like my mind, a maze woven into a place, into people, and it just so happens you can’t actually visit this place in person.
Though with many things, digital writing came with a bit of a downfall for me. I developed carpal tunnel in both of my wrists from the use of arcade games and the computer. It’s caused all of my writing, not just digital but hand writing as well, to suffer. I can only sit at a computer for so long before my wrists start to hurt, and writing long pages causes my hands to cramp. I have to move my wrists around and take breaks more often than I want. Even now I sit here having to shake my hands out to the side of the desk before I can continue on. I’ve tried quite a few different things, wrist braces, gel pads to rest my wrists on while I type, nothing seems to make it better. And sitting in a class taking long notes, especially when the teacher is talking fast, it get hard after awhile. My hands almost become unusable after I’m done, at least for a few minutes till they relax and the muscles don’t feel like they are squeezing to a point of immobilization. That doesn’t stop me, writing has become a part of my life, a part of who I am, it’s like I’m not complete without spending a few minutes a day writing. It doesn’t mater what medium I’m using to write, either; pen or paper, or even digitally, so long as I’m writing, nor does it matter if someone’s eventually going to read my work. I write for me, when I want, where I want, and how I want. I don’t think any of that will ever change; the only thing that will change is what I use to write as the digital world expands and develops.
If you would like to know your WPM the site I used is – http://10fastfingers.com/