A Better Pencil - Chapter 1, 3, 5

This was an interesting read in my opinion and my favorite part was chapter 5. This chapter is titled Writing on Clay and it is about different writing technologies including the early days when they used clay tablets and stylists, writing with paper and ink, typewriters, and now modern day computers that have advanced word processors such as Microsoft Word. I thought it was really interesting because I had never really thought about people actually using clay to write on and keep documents on. They used clay tablets, even the size of credit cards at first, for keeping records of inventory and sales.  Then people finally started keeping laws, contracts, and other legal texts on larger tablets of clay about the size of the paper we use today. Writing technologies have evolved immensely since writing on clay, there were a lot of technical difficulties with the clay method such as it did not come ready to use and you had to create a paper shaped tablet of clay and let it harden a little bit each time you needed to produce a written work. While with the paper we have today there is pretty much unlimited supply of it and it is ready to write on which makes the paper and pen/pencil method a lot faster and more efficient. Also carving letters into clay takes a lot more time because it is harder to make legible and there are shards of clay that rise and have to be removed without smudging the content that has been written. One benefit though that I thought was interesting about clay is that they could reuse the clay tablets all the time. When people did not need a certain document anymore they would just get the clay tablet wet a little bit and smooth out the surface so they could rewrite more important things and reuse it. I think this was a way more environmental friendly writing technology because we throw out so much paper every day and it is a waste.

One benefit of using ink and paper though is you can write endless amounts on the front and back of multiple pieces of paper and just staple the pages together, with clay you only had one or two sides of the tablet to write on and that’s all you get. The clay tablets did not allow a person to write a lot of information because there was such limited space. I do believe that the most modern form of writing is the best and most efficient way especially after reading these chapters. One reason I believe this is that typing on a keyboard is very fast after learning how to in school and it is the most legible and professional way of creating a document/any piece of work. Without this modern writing technology we would not have legible documented laws in place and clay tablets especially would not be a good long term record-keeping method.