A journalist’s best tool

A keyboard? A tape recorder? A camera? A pen? Nope. It’s the old-fashioned pencil

Among the many tangible tools in a journalist’s kit, few are more useful than a pencil.

You might deem the pencil increasingly obsolete in a digital world, but many people still use them — schoolchildren, golfers, architects, artists, cartoonists, carpenters, crossword players — and in fact pencil consumption reportedly increases each year.

Among journalists, the pencil may often be overshadowed by the high-tech assortment of microphones and notebooks, tape recorders and cameras, spreadsheets and calculators, keyboards and smartphones. And I would be willing to concede there’s nothing more useful than a good pair of walking shoes, no matter what your profession.

But reporters must be improvisational, adaptable and flexible — and they like pencils because of those same qualities.

Unlike the pen, the pencil neither runs out without warning nor fails catastrophically. It won’t leak or wreck a fine white shirt. It won’t shut down in the cold, or refuse to write upside down, or on plastic, as most pens do. And it is more environmentally friendly than most other writing utensils (a pencil uses graphite, not lead).

When a pencil breaks, you can fix it easily. When it is nearing the end of life, it gives you lots of warning. There are few surprises with a pencil, and rarely any complications. They exude simplicity.

The pencil does not have the pen’s long history of innovation: The reed pen was used in ancient Egypt in the fourth century BCE. It was replaced by the quill (or feather) pen around the sixth century, which was itself nudged aside by the metal nibs that took over in the 1800s. The fountain pen came along in 1827 and the ballpoint was invented in 1888, and has been improved upon ever since. The felt pen arrived in the 1960s.

The pencil, meanwhile, has been around only 500 years, and is still pretty much the same. There have been innovations — a wood holder, an eraser, darker and lighter varieties — but it was perfect in its simplicity to begin with.

And perhaps that’s the key to the pencil’s durability, and its popularity with so many rumpled journalists: in a world that is ever more complicated, it is a technology that remains easy to navigate.

The typewriter was difficult enough to master. Can anyone really say they have harnessed all the abilities of a personal computer, or even a smartphone? Even if you know what these things are capable of, it is often difficult to leverage them.

Somehow, it seems, many humans hit a wall when it comes to technology; most of us can understand and remember only so much. Perhaps that is why people such as Joyce Carol Oates has written all her books in pencil. So did Truman Capote, among many others.

There’s no going back, of course. Like quill pens, television antennae, pay phones, cassette decks, slide projectors, fax machines and their ilk, pencils are no doubt on the well-worn road to virtual obsolescence.

But like the transistor radio, the sextant, or a good old-fashioned map, I’m not sure we want to relegate them to the dustbin just yet.

Paul Berton is editor-in-chief of The Hamilton Spectator and thespec.com. You can reach him at 905-526-3482 or pberton@thespec.com