College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work

The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line.

Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers or delete keys.

The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments.

“What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?” said Phelps.

She wanted students to understand what writing, thinking and classrooms were like before everything turned digital. So, she found a few dozen old manual typewriters in thrift shops and online marketplaces, and created what her syllabus calls an “analog” assignment.

It might be premature to say that typewriters are making a comeback beyond Cornell’s campus. But the revival is part of a national trend toward old-school testing methods like in-class pen-and-paper exams and oral tests to prevent AI use for assignments on laptops.

Typewriters bring ‘old days’ taste of doing one thing at a time

Students arrived for class on a recent analog day to find typewriters at the desks, some with German and some with QWERTY keyboards.

“I was so confused. I had no idea what was happening. I’d seen typewriters in movies, but they don’t tell you how a typewriter works,” said Catherine Mong, 19, a freshman in Phelps’ Intro to German class. “I didn’t know there was a whole science to using a typewriter.”

Like a rotary phone, the manual typewriter appears simple but is not intuitive to the smartphone generation. Phelps demonstrated how to feed the paper manually, striking the keys with force but not so hard the letters would smudge. She explained that the dinging bell signifies the end of a line and the need to manually return the carriage to start the next line. (“Oh,” said one student, “that’s why it’s called ‘return.'”)

“Everything slows down. It’s like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time. And there was joy in doing it,” said Phelps, who brings in her two children, aged 7 and 9, to serve as “tech support” and ensure no one has their phones out.

Students welcomed having fewer distractions

The assignment carries lessons beyond simply how to use a typewriter, which is the whole point.

“It dawned on me that the difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you,” said computer science major Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore, whose class had to write a critique of a German movie they’d watched.

In the absence of screens, there are no notifications to distract you as you write. Without every answer readily available at his fingertips, he asked his classmates for help, which Phelps heartily encouraged.

“While writing the essay, I had to talk a lot more, socialize a lot more, which I guess was normal back then,” Lertdamrongwong said, referring to the typewriter era. “But it’s drastically different from how we interact within the classroom in modern times. People are always on a laptop, always on the phone.”

Without a delete key and the ability to correct every mistake, he paused to think more intentionally about his writing.

“This might sound bad, but I was forced to actually think about the problem on my own instead of delegating to AI or Google search,” he said.

Manual machines were a workout for pinky fingers

Most students found their pinkies weren’t strong enough to touch-type, so they typed more slowly, pecking at the keyboard with their index fingers.

Mong, the freshman, faced the added challenge of a recently broken wrist, requiring her to use just one hand. The self-described perfectionist was initially frustrated with how messy her page looked with odd spacing between certain letters and misspellings. (Phelps told students to backspace and type ‘X’s over errors.)

“This thing I handed in had pencil marks all over it and definitely did not look clean or finished. But it’s part of the process of learning that you’re going to make mistakes,” said Mong, who found the assignment of typing a poem “fun and challenging.”

She embraced the odd spacing and played with the visual boundaries of the page to indent and fragment lines in the style of poet E.E. Cummings. It took several sheets of paper and many mistakes, all of which Mong saved.

“I’m probably going to hang them on my wall,” Mong said. “I’m kind of fascinated by typewriters. I told all my friends, I did a German test on a typewriter!”