About this site

I've spent more than fifteen years teaching people how to write. As an English professor of composition, rhetoric, technical writing, drama, and literature (yes, I get around), I've thought carefully about what writing is, what it does, and what it costs us when we stop paying attention to how we do it.

Analog Proof grew out of that attention.

In my academic work, I sit squarely at the intersection of writing and technology. I research and teach AI-assisted writing in college composition — how large language models are changing what it means to draft, revise, and own an argument. I work with students navigating that shift in real time, and I think seriously about what gets gained and what gets lost when we hand parts of the writing process to machines.

Which is, in part, why I picked up a fountain pen.

What followed wasn't nostalgia. I'm not interested in the past for its own sake. What interested me was the friction. The way a particular nib on a particular paper slows the hand just enough to change the thought. The way ink color affects mood in ways you can't quite explain but can't quite dismiss either. It excites me. The way people who work with these tools talk about them is with a precision and passion that feels more like craft philosophy than consumer enthusiasm.

I'm a rhetorician by training. I study how language works, how meaning is made, how tools shape the messages they carry. Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the contact zone where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, has always struck me as one of the most useful frames in rhetorical theory. We are living inside one right now. The encounter between AI-assisted writing and the culture of handcraft, between algorithmic efficiency and the deliberate slow mark of ink on paper, is not a footnote to contemporary writing culture. It is the story. Analog Proof is my attempt to read that story carefully, from the analog side of the room.

Through essays and examinations I write about the culture, craft, and history of analog writing tools and the people who make, sell, and use them. The goal is to think carefully about objects most people glance past, and to make that thinking worth reading.

Phillip Presswood
Texas, USA
phillip@analogproof.co