“ Bonus point: I sometimes wonder why I’m only able to edit my own writing after it has been printed out, in 3-D form. My prose will always look so flawless on the screen, but then I read the same words on the physical page and I suddenly see all my clichés and banalities and excesses. Why is this the case? Why do I only notice my mistakes after they’re printed on dead trees? I think the same ventral/dorsal explanation applies. I’m so used to seeing my words on the screen – after all, I wrote them on the screen – that seeing them in a slightly different form provides enough tension to awake my ventral stream, restoring a touch of awareness to the process of reading. And that’s when I get out my red pen.”
Jonah Lehrer - The Future of Reading (via lanipauli)
This is why I don’t feel guilty about killing all of those trees when we print proofs at work.
There’s something that’s so much more satisfying about putting pen to paper to make corrections. If you delete something on a screen, it’s as if that original version never existed, as if the final is the same as the first draft. But when something is printed out and marked through, it’s a living record, proof that we are not perfect beings from the start, that perfection takes revision.
(via lanipauli)
Source: Wired
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