September 03, 2007
The metaphor of the "page"
I've never liked using Microsoft Word, so I was primed to enjoy this piece by writer Steven Poole, Goodbye, cruel Word:
....The second crucial thing was an answer to prayers I hadn’t even known I was praying. It was Full-Screen Mode, which I first discovered in WriteRoom. WriteRoom’s slogan is “distraction-free writing”, and it does just what it says on the tin. Your entire screen is blacked out, except for the text you are working on. I now use WriteRoom for all my journalism. When I’m working, the screen of my MacBook looks like this....
[picture of orange text on black screen]
.....Pretty old-skool, huh? It’s perfect: far less temptation to switch to a browser window, much better concentration on the text in front of you. WriteRoom has a “typewriter-scrolling mode”, so that the line you are typing is always centred in the screen, not forever threatening to drop off the bottom, and what you have already written scrolls rapidly up off the top of the screen, dissuading you from idly rereading it. It’s a bit like the endless roll of typewriter paper on which Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road.
So WriteRoom allows me to turn my whizzy modern computer into the nearest equivalent possible (allowing for modern conveniences like backup to the internet and so on) to my old Brother typewriter and its six-line LCD. The focus is on the words and nothing else. Except for that line you can just make out at the bottom left of the screen. That’s the Live Word Count.
Microsoft Word still uses the metaphor of the page, the computer screen that imitates a blank, bounded sheet of physical paper. For me, this is outdated and unimaginative. It has become a barrier rather than a window. And there is always the distraction of changing font and line-spacing, jumping ahead too quickly to imagining the text as a visual, physical product instead of a process, a fluid semantic interplay. Instead, turning my MacBook into a kind of replica 1980s IBM machine, with the words glowing and hovering in an interstellar void, is liberating: as though I am composing the Platonic ideal of a text that might eventually take many different forms....(Thanks to Gruber)
When I first encountered it the metaphor of the "page" seemed so utterly cool. WYSIWYG, and all that. And of course it still is, for many purposes. But it can also be so very irritating. I suppose I ought to take a look at the two programs he uses, WriteRoom and Scrivener. But I probably won't find the heart to do so. The truth is, I fell in love once, with the old WriteNow, and since my sweetheart perished along the cruel upgrade trail, I've never looked at another.
Poole's book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality
Uh, sorry to break this to you pal, but if the terrorists are fighting a war, then they are committing war crimes daily, and we could, and probably should, execute them on the battlefield. Under the Geneva Conventions POW status is a reward for following the rules of war. It is Rumsfeld & Co who are being asymmetricly humane and decent.
And I can bet he never once contrasts the terrorist's phrases with the simple fact that any Coalition soldiers captured by al Queda have received torture and death, and usually had their bodies booby-trapped to blow up others... That kinda stuff is OK with a lefty; only Bush and Blair are real, and merit criticism.
Posted by John Weidner at September 3, 2007 08:51 AMI currently use TextEdit, and just type. I saw a screed, once, about MS Word, which detailed the ways in which it is actually detrimental to writing and publishing and it resonated. Fonts and spacing do, indeed, get in the way, but more than that the helpful Auto feature is enough to drive anyone nuts. No, don't capitalize my stuff. No, don't change my grammar. No, don't bullet my list!
That screed also explained why publishers hate Word, mainly because it screws up their formatting so very thoroughly. Besides, with a text editor, you can have the publishing prgram do things such as change the chapter numbering automatically, which Word doesn't seem to be able to do. (Kind of strange, if you think about it.)
Don't let the computers think for you. Learn to think for yourself!
Posted by: B. Durbin at September 3, 2007 10:12 AMYou can turn off a lot of those auto things in Word. But it's a real pain in the ass to do so.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 3, 2007 12:21 PM"TextEdit, and just type." That's mostly what I do, too. There are some souped-up versions of TextEdit on the market, but I haven't tried them. And for things that need to be formatted I use—you may laugh—Appleworks. A great program, though not updated since back during the Clinton administration...
Posted by: John Weidner at September 3, 2007 12:49 PMYou can get Word to do formatting correctly, but like turning off the auto-help, it's a PITA and requires deep knowledge of how Word works.
I still favor moderately WYSIWYG because if the formatting is supposed to help your reader understand your text, shouldn't it help you as well? If it isn't, it seems the solution should be to re-format rather than switch editors. I will admit, I haven't used Word 2007, I stopped upgrading with 2003.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at September 3, 2007 03:44 PMI'm not entirely convinced by the process of judging a book by its amazon reader reviews. ;)
Posted by: Steven at September 3, 2007 03:54 PMSteven,
Even troll reviewers know that, to be even plausible, their reviews have to have something to do with the book. I suspect the reviewer is on to something-- many, if not most, of the folks like Poole, who make their living with words, have lost touch with the reality described by words, and have come to mistake their words for reality. Once that happens, it becomes very easy to fall into the Leftist trap of moral relativism-- "It's just words, after all....."
John,
ORANGE text on a black screen? Yecch. Give me WordStar on an IBM XT with monochrome video-- GREEN on black. It's much easier on the eyes. (I once used in the early '80s a terminal that used orange-on-black. Very irritating....)
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 3, 2007 04:12 PMActually, "It's just words, after all" is precisely the opposite of Unspeak's message. Luckily, we need not rely on amazon reviewers: the book has its own website, with extracts and everything. ;)
Posted by: Steven at September 3, 2007 04:27 PMWell, I just read the extract "Trading in freedom," and I'm totally unimpressed. That someone like President Bush is going to use rather loaded language to support his views is mildly intertesting, but the author just uses this as a thin excuse for a lot of leftist jabs and sneers.
And the cute thing is that since this is purportedly "only about how language is used," there's no need to make a factual or logical counter-argument. The author just assumes that the reader will agree that, say, opening Iraq to free trade and foreign ownership is some sort of vague unspecified nasty capitalist plot. It's all insinuations under a cloak of studying political speech.
We all of us, in casual debate, phrase things in a way that assumes that our side is sensible and wise, and the other side is peddling malarky. I do it all the time. Big deal. What separates the men from the boys is whether, when challenged, you can back up your positions with deep arguments taken from core values and a well thought-out philosophy. I can do that. I could defend the opening of Iraq to freer trade, (or indeed the whole Iraq Campaign) with rational arguments, (example ) and without needing to gloss over the pain and drawbacks that these policies will entail.
My guess is that Mr Poole can't do the same. That is, I suspect he does not have deep convictions and a logical system or philosophy to support his many little sneers at capitalism, free trade, privatisation, etc. I hope that I'm wrong about this; I would prefer that the people I disagree with be honorable and weighty opponents, able to hit me hard..
But you know what? I've been prodding leftists to debate in this blog since November 2001, and while they will lunge at me if I make a factual error or mis-step (such as judging a book by its amazon review), NOT ONCE have I persuaded one to engage in a real principled debate. Not once.
That is actually the most interesting discovery I've made because of my blogging. Leftists seem to be just clothes walking about with no emperor inside...
Posted by: John Weidner at September 3, 2007 06:16 PMMmm, perhaps you'll prefer the extract on "Intelligent Design"...
Plenty of real principled debates on Iraq at unspeak.net, where we tend to respect facts.
Posted by: Steven at September 3, 2007 06:39 PM
