In a grim political season, there are signs that journalists are successfully challenging at least one odious tyrant.
In Slate, Rachel Withers has reported that in newsrooms throughout the United States, Microsoft Word is finally giving way to other programs, including Google Docs.
Some of the journalists Withers interviewed mentioned costs – Word may have become cheaper but in straitened modern newsrooms it’s hard to compete with free.
Others mentioned Google’s superiority as a platform for collaborative work. This is true, and it hints at a broader truth – Word is no longer fit for the purposes that many writers and editors need it to fulfil.
Word was launched in 1983. Then it was quite a simple program, running in DOS, and it emerged into a rich ecology of programs designed for writing.
In the 1980s, applications such as WordStar and WordPerfect enjoyed healthy sales and won influential fans. (Some clung to these dependable platforms – George RR Martin has made millions from Game of Thrones but he still taps the books out on WordStar 4.0, released in 1987).
Word’s fortunes ascended with Microsoft’s. The company’s close partnership with computer and chip manufacturers, and its own ruthlessness, led to a near-monopoly on home and office computing in the 1990s.
Word processing alternatives – either due to internal failures or Microsoft’s aggressive promotion of its own products – withered. Word’s ubiquity is a product of its maker’s shrewd business practices, not of good design.
This was also the period when home computing became a mass phenomenon. So from this point on, generations of writers grew up with Word. The program then followed them into school or university, and then into newsrooms, publishing houses and academic offices.
Many writers still think they don’t have a choice. Just as its stablemate Powerpoint came to define – even dominate – professional presentations, Word came to be synonymous with writing.
As technology has marched on, Word has tried to keep up by adding features. It rarely subtracts any. Its WYSIWYG features were honed for the boom in desktop publishing. Other features have been piled on to the worldwide web, social media and cloud computing.
The result, over time, has been feature bloat, and a package that is neither fish nor fowl.
On the one hand, we want to write in Word. On the other, it is designed to produce an on-screen artifact that matches the eventual (though frequently hypothetical) printed page. And it also offers features that Microsoft claims are geared to the online world.
Too often these are cross-purposes.
Who has not struggled to remove superfluous page numbers or correct automated and unwanted formatting, or watched an image or a table displace entire pages of text? Who has not been frustrated by efforts to collaborate on a Word document in the cloud?
Who has not asked themselves why they are staring at a document, whose form and very name still apes the conventions established in the era of the printing press.
For most people – and especially professional writers – their task is the production of text. Ideally it will be text which, with the minimum of fuss, can be used across different contexts – content management system, emails or Twitter clients.
As long ago as 2012, also in Slate, Tom Scocca pointed this out. He called Word “an overbearing boss, one who specialises in make-work”. He pointed to the way that its hidden freight of metadata and invisible code gum up content management systems.
He also criticised the its relentless and unwanted “help” with formatting, which means constantly fighting against automated lists, formatted quotation marks and mysterious indentation (not to mention, at times, Clippy).
Word, in short, gets in the way of producing words. It has done for a very long time. There have been eloquent pleas for writers to abandon it over more than a decade. In an age of information overload, the program’s problems have come to seem more pressing.
After all, each minute spent struggling with the problems Word creates is at best a minute in which one could be writing. At worst it is a temptation to Google a solution, which exposes us to the torrents of distraction provided by the internet.
Its defenders may say that most of these problems reflect inadequate training in the program’s use. It is also perhaps true that, given time, many of us could learn to fly an Airbus A380. But the fact is that we don’t need to, and we are mostly happy to leave such complicated tasks to specialists.
The good news in 2018 is that alternatives once more exist. There is now an array of writer-focused technologies and the communities that evangelise them.
When Virginia Heffernan launched her own broadside at Word in the New York Times a decade ago, she spoke rapturously of Scrivener, which a generation of writers have come to love. I know many who appreciate its capacity to help structure their work, and to break it down into manageable chunks.
But Scrivener still suffers from what designers call “skeumorphism”, the tendency to reproduce the inefficiencies of older technologies in the design of new ones. Like Word, it tries too hard to ape the characteristics of obsolete “writerly” media – the index card, the notebook, the ring binder.
Over the past few years I have come to love an experience closer to what Ernie Smith calls “bare metal writing”. I use a program called Ulysses, which offers a simple, clean and logical design, and whose output is nothing but text.
Once you have mastered its version of the simple MarkDown format, you can produce documents that incorporate some light formatting. But my aim with Ulysses is to produce text. How it looks when it gets to you is way above my pay grade.
The program alienated some of its adherents by going to a subscription model last year. For me, the monthly fee for an app that gets out of the way seems a bargain.
Lately I’ve gone further in seeking an uncorrupted writing experience.
Right now I am typing on something called the AlphaSmart Neo2, which is as close to a pure writing machine as I have seen.
It is no longer manufactured but there are thousands of the things on eBay. It was originally marketed to schools as a no-frills word processor. It’s nothing more than a keyboard with an LCD screen. No internet, no games, not even any colours to distract me from my task.
A certain subset of writers have turned it into something of an online cult. I can see why.
When I have finished this column I will send it to Ulysses with a USB cable. Then revise it, then export it and send it in an email to my human editor.
No metadata, no unwanted artifacts, no broken tables. No distractions. Nothing but text.
Freedom is yours, fellow writers. You just have to want it.
