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Comment by dooglius | Hacker News Reader

>Given that they can write and submit their school reports with smartphones

Would students really do this? I couldn't imagine trying to write an entire essay or a lab report on a smartphone. Maybe Japanese schools don't have to turn in longer things like that?

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As someone who recently worked in education... yes. Anecdotally, I tended to see it at the community-college level with students who owned a large-screen phone and didn't own a computer.

I don't think anyone is writing whole research papers or serious lab reports on phones. A two-page reading response is totally doable. Something with footnotes or equations, not so much.

Yes, one can technically vomit out a few hundred words using a small touch screen. But the tools make it damn difficult to edit and re-organize text. Does this mean that all such reports are basically stream-of-consciousness writing instead of a more carefully polished piece of work?

It's not hard to edit & reorganised with larger screen smartphone at all.

It seems like it would be more awkward than with a mouse+keyboard controlled text editor, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I'd love to get better with working with touchscreens, but I haven't seen any way of getting the composability I've become accustomed to on the *nix command line and associated editors (be it vim, emacs or even the monoliths of atom and vscode).

Of course it's more awkward. But it's also not hard. And if a phone is all you've got, and you don't have the money to spend on a computer on top of it... then you make do. It's not the end of the world. It's fine.

That's a fair point. I know it's the not the end of the world, but I guess I was just hoping to be shown a particularly efficient method of touchscreen input.

Also: to further the point, it is possible but even more invonvenient to fix mistakes and reflow text on a physical page - but that doesn't mean that all text written on paper is stream-of-conciousness

There are many writing apps available, for example Microsoft Word free edition. One does not have to compose in a text box. Use the app to write it then copy and paste the result.

The more I use my iPhone X, the better I am at it. I actually prefer its keyboard to the iPad’s for prose now, because you can long press the period and select text much more easily. If you can do that with the iPad, I’ve not found it yet.

iPad doesn't have 3D Touch yet but you can press the keyboard with two fingers instead.

Well the good side is that the UI also makes it very hard to select and copy-paste from wikipedia!

> damn difficult to edit and re-organize text

The honest and unfortunate answer is, in my personal experience, that editing and re-organizing text doesn't often happen in students' papers regardless of the tools available to them. Not knowing how to type well is one thing, but a _lot_ of students get to college not knowing how to write a half-decent paper (and then still don't learn squat in their freshman composition class).

I mean, if you grew up with phone keyboard as your main method of text entry, this might be normal to you.

I used to write my reports on a type writer. A smartphone would have been a dream come true back then.

But didn't you write a longhand draft first? Or at least longhand outlines?

Yeah, but I mean, those didn't have spell check or word completion or copy/paste or even backspace. Do you know the pain of typing a wrong character on a typewriter? It gets old.

FWIW I had a typewriter in ~1995 that actually had a backspace. It had a white ribbon, similar to white out and it kept a small history buffer so it knew which key to erase. It was an amazing invention.

Yup i also were enthusiast with my grandfather modern typewriter which had a one line alphanumeric LCD where you could type one line, re read and correct it and it would print it only when you pressed return.

I think mine had this feature too.

When I first got a typewriter, I wrote shortish papers in 2 drafts on the typewriter. The outline was in my head, and "editing" was staring at the first draft and rearranging them as I typed the second and final version.

You probably use a different technique.

I changed how I did things a year later when I started typesetting papers in TeX.

Japanese isn't as well suited to a keyboard as English is; a smartphone and keyboard are about equally fast for typing Japanese.

I have totally had college students turn in essays that were written on their phone.

Yes.

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