An idiot persists in his error

Am I the only one who commits far more errors when writing on the computer—stupid misspellings, extra words, left-out words, wrong words, inversions of words—than I ever did when writing on the typewriter? In a message that I sent just now, I intended to write “west side” and wrote “wide side” instead (and only noticed after sending the message). I do this all the time. I never used to do it at all.

One cause, I know, is thought outracing fingers. By the time I was about to type out the word west my mind was already on the word side, and so I hamfistedly combined them. But still. I seem to see things differently on a computer screen. The eye scans words on a screen, but focuses upon words on paper. (You too read faster on a computer, I’d bet, but also absorb less of the content.) From a very early age, before I was even out of grammar school, I wrote on a manual typewriter, teaching myself on an old Underwood. The words I would hammer out on it, taking shape letter by letter, were tangible. They left indentations in the paper. The verso felt like braille.

Is the fault my childhood training? That I never became accustomed to anything else? For years and years I stuck with manual typewriters, turning up my nose at the IBM Selectric. Even though I was a fairly early computer user—I got my first Apple IIe in 1983—by then it may have been too late. I was an old dog incapable of learning a new trick.

Is it only us oldtimers who are sloppier on a computer than we ever were on a typewriter? Are younger writers, some of whom may not even have heard of typewriters, blessedly free of such absent-minded errors? One piece of evidence: I rarely garble a sentence when I am copying a passage, looking down on a book at my left hand and not up at the screen. The fault, I am beginning to think, lies not in our age but in our eyes.