Poet Ponders the Digital

Use the best tool for the job. It's a simple saying, and one many writers ignore. Paper and pencil, while often my preferred tools for writing, have not been the best tools for writing for at least a century. Typewriters are better, if you are concerned with speed and legibility. Typewriters with correction tape gave us another reason to prefer the mechanical to graphite sticks and wood pulp. I remember my sense of awe when I saw the earliest word processors. These were typewriters with memory, and sometimes a disk drive. Not quite computers, but certainly something more than a manual typewriter, I wanted one… but never owned one. Instead, I upgraded from a blue Smith Corona manual typewriter to a brown Brother electric. Even after receiving an early home computer, a Commodore VIC-20, the typewriter was the best device for writing quickly. My first real computer, a Tandy 1000, included a simple suite called DeskMate. I used the text editor to write stories, saving the...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley March 3, 2014 Deadline April 2014 Issue More Than a Typewriter: The Power of Word Typewriters still amaze me, especially the antique mechanical models. There’s something wonderful about the feel of levers, gears, springs and rollers working together to transmit thoughts into words. Typewriters possess a romance computer keyboards and touch screens lack. But, please, stop using your word processor like a typewriter. Word processor abuse mars many otherwise good documents. Bad habits people develop over time lead to documents that are ugly and difficult to edit and revise. The numerous excuses for improper word processing deserve dismissal. It does not take days or even hours to learn to use tabs effectively. Paragraph styles take minutes to understand and appreciate. Even a complex looking table of contents takes only a few mouse clicks to create if you construct a document properly. When you know more about your software tools, you also kno...

Monday night, I spent an hour reviewing basic Word skills with my students. One student asked why she needed to learn the "right" way to use Word, when nobody cared if you used spaces instead of tabs, hit return instead of inserting page breaks, and manually numbered your pages. I was stunned, to say the least, that anyone — especially a child of the digital age — could suggest software skills aren't important. Learning to use any application effectively eventually saves time and improves your work. If you learn how to use Word moderately well, you save minutes a day, and those minutes become hours over a month. Learning any application's features opens up new possibilities. I tell my students that letting Word automate some tasks frees more time to focus on the words instead of the formatting. To me, this is a self-evident observation: I would rather spend time writing rather than formatting. And then, on Wednesday, I received an official departmental syllabus ...

In college, I wrote software documentation for mainframe users, which meant I had the opportunity to use text editors and word processors on a variety of computer platforms. I composed documentation on everything from glorified typewriters (DEC VT102 and IBM 3270 terminals) to slick WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") Apple Macs. I was probably not alone in being captivated by the Mac experience. Toss in PageMaker, a few fonts, and a LaserWriter for a complete desktop publishing system, and the Mac was hard to beat. Yet, I quickly realized that I wrote better on my MS-DOS 2.1 PC running WordPerfect 4.2 from floppy disks. How could this be? The Mac was easier to use and the papers I typed looked much better on paper. Why did I type so much more, and much better, on the PC? I didn't work on the Mac; I explored. I'd play with fonts, formatting options, and the nifty features of Word or PageMaker. I'd also play Crystal Quest, Lode Runner, and Dark Castle for ...