Modeling Context and the Individual

Fairman, Tony. 2015. Language in print and handwriting. In Anita Auer, Daniel Schreier & Richard J. Watts (eds.), Letter Writing and Language Change (Studies in English Language), 53–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fink, Kristina. 2022. Warum und wie Typoskripte analysieren? Überlegungen zu einer Systematik der Rekonstruktion von Textgenese bei Typoskripten mit ausgewählten Beispielen aus der Nachlass-Edition Arthur Schnitzlers. editio 36. 33–71.
Gredig, Andi. 2021. Schreiben mit der Hand. Begriffe, Diskurs, Praktiken (Sprachwissenschaft 49). Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Havinga, Anna. 2021. Intra-individual Variation in Nineteenth-century Private letters In: Alexander Werth, Lars Bülow, Simone E. Pfenninger & Markus Schiegg (eds.), Intra-individual Variation in Language, (Trends in Linguistic Studies and Monographs 363), 315–346. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Lyons, Martyn. 2014. QWERTYUIOP. How the Typewriter Influenced Writing Practices. Quærendo 44. 219–240.
McCarthy, Philip M. & Scott Jarvis. 2010. MTLD, vocd-D, and HD-D: A validation study of sophisticated approaches to lexical diversity assessment. Behavior Research Methods 42. 381–392.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1999. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, 8th edn. Cambridge (MA) & London: The MIT Press.
Viollet, Catherine. 1997. Écriture méchanique, espaces de frappe. Quelques préalables à une sémiologie du dactylogramme. Genesis 10, https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00079732. (13 July 2023.)

Before the worldwide spread and commercialisation of the typewriter at the end of the 19th century, every text was first written by hand – even when printed afterwards (Fairman 2015; Gredig 2021). Changing the writing device meant not simply the use of a different instrument but imposed a paradigmatic change on professional and non-professional writers and thus on the texts they produced (Fink 2022). Friedrich Nietzsche, being one of the first German authors to use a typewriter, wrote to a friend of his: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (as cited in Lyons 2014: 232). To date, however, there have been no attempts to explore how the change of writing device impacts on intraindividual variation, and specifically how such a change in mode may catalyse cognitive and pragmatic effects on both the writer and the textual shape, form, and complexity of their material (Fink 2022; Viollet 1997)
The advantages of the typewriter were its increased writing speed, a higher objectivity, regularity, and tidiness (Lyons 2014; Viollet 1997) or even the apparent evocation of a more standardized spelling and grammar (McLuhan 1999). Nevertheless, negative characteristics such as the emergence of a greater distance between writer and addressee as well as writer and text or a loss of intimacy have also been attributed to the typewriter (Lyons 2014; Viollet 1997). In addition, changes in writing style may be observed, especially among non-professional writers, which may be apparent in the use of shorter sentences and fewer adjectives (Lyons 2014).
To examine the impact of the typewriter as language-external factor (Havinga 2021) on the intraindividual variation in personal writing, I conduct a single-person case study by analysing 34 letters of one writer to one addressee. The mechanic Karl Müller emigrated from Hard in Vorarlberg (Austria) to the United States in 1930 and wrote at least 34 letters to his friend Josef Lerchmüller at home on a regular basis. Over the span of almost nine years (1930–1939), he composed and sent about 4 letters per year. While Müller wrote his letters by hand at the beginning of their joint correspondence, he gradually switched to using an Underwood typewriter in the last months of the year 1932. The 12 handwritten and 22 typewritten letters comprise on average 1,172.18 words (SD = 1,060.03, range = 131–4,838).
In my talk, I analyse the fluency, accuracy, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity in each letter by considering, e.g., the text length, the total number of correctly produced sentences and occurring self-corrections, the sentence length and the MTLD (McCarthy and Jarvis 2010). Thereby I focus specifically on changes that temporally coincide with the writer’s shift of writing device. On the whole, this talk makes an important methodological contribution: By focusing on variation across four measures of textual output and with relatively dense data (i.e., 34 letters), we glean first insights into how language-external, mode-related factors impact on intraindividual variation and which measures are most notably influenced by the change in writing device.