I'm trying out this new screen capture software. It should allow me to make movies of my editing in real time. Also (as I am now noticing) it will make me more selfconscious about my typing. Maybe also my thinking. The software is not expensive (and I'm using a free trial version right now). I wonder if there is any pedagogical value in watching yourself type, witnessing your first impulse and your first few corrections.
Well, this has now taken me about three minutes to write. I now going to publish the post and get the video ready for upload.
It is strange that you would leave out "value" in pedagogical value, since exactly that concept seems to be constitutive of the point of the post.
ReplyDeleteI’ve noticed the same peculiarity in my own typing. Unfortunately, I tend to make a lot of omissions and even more unfortunately these omissions tend to be crucial concepts rather than peripheral words.
I guess that it’s some sort of neurological phenomenon on the small scale; the concept is already in the focus of your attention and therefore you don’t notice its absence in your gestalt of the sentence.
I wonder if this phenomenon has a tendency to repeat itself on a greater scale; say, in a whole article.
That would be a point about writing, not merely about typing.
There's is something disconcertingly psychoanalytical about your analysis. My explanation would be more pedestrian: I was going to write "a pedagogical point" and changed my mind to "any pedagogical value". I went back to implement the first half of the difference, but since I had not even written the second half I was not cued to complete the task. It just sort of felt like I was finished implementing the edit.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't refute your conjecture entirely, of course. And it is interesting to watch that part of the film (from 2:00 and on) on the assumption that something in the typing would reveal who is right.
No one should probably subject their whole writing process to this sort of scrutiny. But I think it might be useful in bursts.