“What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway and you didn’t write it yourself? Can you create it without a computer?” Phelps said.
She wanted her students to understand what writing, thinking, and the classroom were like before everything was digital. So she found dozens of old manual typewriters at thrift stores and online marketplaces and created what the syllabus simply called “analogue” assignments.
It may be premature to say that the typewriter is making a comeback beyond Cornell’s campus. But this resurgence is part of a national trend toward old-fashioned testing methods, such as in-class pen-and-paper exams and oral exams, to prevent the use of AI in laptop assignments.
Typewriters bring a taste of the “old days” of doing one thing at a time
Students arrived for class on a recent analog day to find typewriters at their desks, some with German and QWERTY keyboards.
“I was very confused. I didn’t understand what was going on. I had seen typewriters in movies, but they never told me how typewriters worked,” said Katherine Mon, 19, a freshman in Phelps’ introductory German class. “I didn’t know there was a complete science to using a typewriter.”
Like rotary phones, manual typewriters look simple but are not intuitive for the smartphone generation. Phelps demonstrated how to manually feed the paper by pressing the keys hard enough to smear the letters. She explained that the sound of the bell meant the end of the line and the need to manually move the carriage back to start the next line. (“Oh, that’s why it’s called ‘returning,’” said one student.)
“Everything slows down. It’s like the old days when you were really doing one thing at a time, and there was joy in doing it,” Phelps said. She brings her two children, ages 7 and 9, as “tech support” and makes sure no one takes out their cell phones.
Students welcomed fewer distractions.
This assignment has lessons beyond just how to use a typewriter, and that’s the point.
“I realized that the difference from typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you,” said Ratchaphon Ratdamrongwong, a sophomore computer science major. In this class, we were required to write a review of a German movie we had seen.
There’s no screen, so there are no notifications to distract you while you write. With all the answers not readily available, he turned to his classmates for help. Phelps wholeheartedly encouraged this.
“While writing essays, I had to talk more and socialize more. I think that was normal back then,” Lertdamrongwong said of the typewriter era. “But it’s very different from modern classroom interactions. People are always on their laptops, people are on their phones all the time.”
Without a delete key or the ability to fix all his mistakes, he stopped to think more intentionally about his writing.
“It may sound harsh, but I had to actually think about the problem myself instead of leaving it to AI or Google search,” he said.
The manual machine was a little finger workout.
Most students realized that their little fingers weren’t strong enough to touch type, so they typed more slowly, poking at the keyboard with their index fingers.
As a freshman, Mong faced the added challenge of having just broken her wrist and only being able to use one hand. A self-described perfectionist, she was initially frustrated by how cluttered the pages looked, with odd spacing between certain letters and misspellings. (Phelps asked students to backspace and type an “X” if there was an error.)
“The work I submitted had pencil marks all over it and obviously didn’t look clean or finished, but it’s part of the process of learning that you can make mistakes,” said Mong, who found the poetry typing assignment “fun and challenging.”
She employed odd spacing and played with the visual boundaries of the page, including indenting and fragmenting lines in the style of poet EE Cummings. It took several sheets of paper and a lot of mistakes, but Mong saved us all.
“I’m probably going to put it up on the wall,” Mon said. I’m a little interested in typewriters. I told all my friends that I took a German test on a typewriter! ”
