My Rhetoric professor preached incessantly of the importance and value of post-composing editing. It seems like such a simple thing, but it is fantastically hard to unlearn edit-as-you-go. In a related vein, my Creative Writing professor used to have us do (a quite common) exercise where we turned off the monitor on our computers and did our writing, so we would not be tempted to edit as we wrote, not even for spelling. But these technological distinctions do make me wonder about how a writer's consciousness develops with the tools given to her. One, of course, develops a more authoritative voice after a while. It takes some work to keep track of the various textual fragments. Which is why I'm sometimes a slow writer. These days, if it's deleted (and not, say, copied to another text file), it's gone. Nevertheless, this was good for wishy-washy writers who sometimes have to revert back to previous ideas in an effort to pursue them again. But it was also a pain in the ass to strike out a section with whiteout. Yes, typing out stuff was a pain in the ass in the analog days. I also wonder if there's something inevitably lost in the transition from typewriter to computer. However good we get, the act will always be a little freakish. We compose on keys the way dogs walk on two legs. The 130-year-old qwerty keyboard may even have been designed to slow fingers and prevent key jamming. What could be less conducive to thought’s cadences than stopping every time your short-term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You’d be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow. MeFites who are interested in this kind of subject might want to read Richard Powers' essay on how the National Book Award winning writer (a very articulate man indeed) switched entirely to speech recognition for his writing output: I can only speak for myself here, but I wonder if other writers have seen the focus of their writing shift because of these software environmental conditions. But there's something to be said about the psychological differences between working with a word processing program that you must call up from a command line and one that can be fired up from a shortcut. I am not certain if these two programs entirely solve the problem, unless it's incredibly difficult to escape from the text editor and retreat to the other windows. (This was the only way I could finish a large project a few years ago: taking the whole damn thing on paper with me into a cafe, sans laptop, and working on it for hours by pen.) This is probably why I do a lot of rewriting by hand because there is absolutely nothing distracting that trusty conduit between the text and my brain. And particularly when the window can be easily disabled through one keystroke or one can easily Alt-Tab between windows. Particularly when I am aware of the distractions that lie beyond the window. Yes, there's that full-screen mode in Word. I'm going to have to try this out.Īs someone who cut his teeth on WP 5.1, I can say that it is only through sheer self-discipline and bizarre social engineering with other writers (where the writers cannot leave until they've done their work) that I've managed to write anything at all (and specifically I speak of Microsoft Word here). Posted by Skygazer at 8:18 AM on January 12, 2007 I didn't realize there were others out there who felt this way.We should start a Yahoo club. So I gave up dammit.and now I've come back to the promised land Hallelujah. Whoa.what a major Mother-effin' pain in the ass and I had to jump through hoops, you have to create a table on the page and change the background color and woe unto you if you just want to cut and paste some text somewhere else. I mean how friggin' hard could it be to get a plain dark screen with text on it. I'd waited long enough and did not want to deal with a BS PC). So I fiannly get a swank new home PC (a Micron with all the bells and whistles.no expense spare. I used it as a word processor and I did some work I was really proud of on it. A good screen to do some good thinking and writing in front of. Simple, functional, soothing on the eyes, no visual noise. When I first got a computer in 1997 one of the first things I did was try and emulate the DOS Pine email client I'd been using at work, A plain green text on a dark terminal- like screen.
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