I’ve talked before about being a bit of a dork about writing technology. Full-screen editing; minimal distractions; storing notes, links, and research together in handy projects; there’s plenty of sexy stuff when writing on a computer.
On this topic, Author Steven Poole’s got a lively post on his blog about giving up on Microsoft Word. Something I did well over two years ago. While I compiled my short story collection for my MFA thesis on Word, creating the table of contents and page numbers on it, I haven’t actually written anything using Word in years. For the stories in my collection I used a program called CopyWrite. Since then I’ve switched to doing most of my writing in raw text editors or a program called Scrivener, which Poole also mentions in his article.
Like most things involving technology it doesn’t really matter what you construct your work with, but it’s still fun and sometimes productive to reconsider your methods and ditch things — like Word — that just don’t work very well.
Read it all here: Steven Poole – Goodbye, cruel Word
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Comments 2
wow- that’s some serious conversation going on over there. I actually just tried Word 2007 for the first time and it looks a lot like a web page (or moreso like a wysiwyg editor). It kind of has a google feel to it as well.
Posted 07 Sep 2007 at 12:45 am ¶I recommend taking a look at DevonThink:
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/index.html
I’ve been using it for a couple of years now and virtually live within the program now. Steve Berlin Johnson is a big fan. Here’s an article he wrote about it:
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html
Posted 08 Sep 2007 at 5:16 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
[...] as Gordon over at After the MFA where he stopped using Word over two years ago as noted in “The Last Word on Word“. Steven Poole documents the change that Gordon picked up on in his post “Goodbye, [...]
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