Personal Response To Bonnie Liang's An Ode To A User Friendly Pencil

Personal Response to Bonnie Liang's "An Ode to a User Friendly Pencil" How many times have we've been told to hand in formal writing typed? For the average writer this is already assumed to be the standard. Having a computer is seen as favourable for writing. Although, according to Bonnie Liang, this may not be the case. In her essay "An Ode to a User Friendly Pencil", she suggests that pencils surpass the computer as a writing tool. Laing goes on to say that computers are too expensive, limit the writer, and create social pretence. These points are indicative of her bias as a writer and a person who did not grow up interacting daily with computers. I disagree with her sentiments and found her main argument to be unconvincing. Laing's thesis is based only her experiences with the computer, thus her points are limited and her perspective is dated. Laing argues that pencils are capable of creating various and unlimited fonts that the computer cannot. She claims that pencils are only limited by the writer’s abilities, a “Durer or Da Vinci Factor”( Laing 333), yet she forgets that calligraphers are the artists that create the fonts in the first place. I agree with the point that a pencil’s graphic capabilities are limited only by the operator’s skill, but so is the computer. For instance, if a sketch artist does not know how to …show more content…
She vents her frustration by providing anecdotes to make it very evident what her attitude towards the subject matter is. She speaks about her experiences in a humorous and informal manner, saying that "an exorcist [would need to] be consulted" (332) to fix her computer. This illustrates how she expresses her frustrations while maintaining an amusing tone. She uses phrases like "frozen waffles"(332) and "I wrestled with my microchips"(332) to reveal the essay's overall light-hearted