Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
Hitch, your defense of Word and WordPerfect betray your life as an editor. They aren't good tools for an author, however, because writing isn't linear. See Rob Sawyer's explication at https://sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm for why he and I and other writers never understood why people opted for WordPerfect over WordStar in the 1980s/1990s.
Word can be kludged, of course, with a WordStar command set written by Mike Petrie, who also maintains a WS website. That's how I use Word, though I have little interest in styles. It's so easy to clean up Word's awful html! Why waste time adapting yesterday's styles to today's book?
Just FWIW. I realize this doesn't apply to your line of work, and perhaps not that of anyone else here. In college I learned to compose on a typewriter, but I always had a yellow lined pad at hand when things got tough. The day I discovered "computer" composition (an Olympia electronic typewriter with a computer extension with a 5.25 inch disk drive) was a joyous one, March 1985. I sold that piece for $250 and never looked back. At last I could massage a story or essay until it just FELT GOOD, and only then print it out -- and mail it, of course! It was several years before editors would accept a computer disk (or many disks, in the case of a book). |
Y'know, NJ...
As you know, as you're the one who told me, and I have some of your books, I know who you are, and that buys you a fair amount of "pass" from me. However, while you might be
remotely correct, in that my "creative" writing is not mighty, I've composed quite literally millions of words, in everything from manuals to letters to legal documents, you name it, since the advent of the earliest computer. (In fact, in the last 125 weeks, I have composed, written and typed 8,530,509 [Eight Million, Five Hundred Thirty Thousand, Five Hundred Nine) words of business correspondence. Over 68K words/week. I'll put that up against even Rex Stout's
formidable output.) Hell, I introduced computing to my RE Development firm by the expedient of building a then 8086 box with my spouse and dragging the damned thing into my office, and "forcing" the firm into the digital age in '86, I think it was. Ah, the miracle of spreadsheets. (When building millions of square feet of projects and needing to track or calculate ROI, trust me, spreadsheets WERE a miracle...)
But the idea that I preferred WP, because I was an "editor" is just flatly wrong. Anyone with a left-brain preference would love WP over its competitors, for one simple reason--reveal codes. Once you understood the simple expedient of wrapping text in elements and styles...how elegant. How simple and how formidable.
Sure, writing may not be "linear," but that has sweet FA to do with preferring WS to WP to Word to Bob's Big Word Processor. It's frankly a bit idiotic to think that someone prefers WP due to "linear" processes. There's nothing more "linear" about WP than WS than Word. You wanna write, write.
I would argue, in fact, that Word allows writers to be far freeer in non-linear writing than almost any other tool, because it allows them to be as damned dumb about the software as they wish. Write away, don't use headers or styles--but if you do, you can at least use the Document Pane to keep remote track of where you are, allowing you to drip your words of wisdom anywhere you want in the document. Unlike Scrivener, you're not stuck making wee "cards" for the "corkboard" or any of that drivel. Hell, you can be as non-linear in Word as is humanly
possible on a computer, although, yes, it
hardly compares with scribbling drivel on a yellow-lined pad and then screwing those pages up into corkscrews and throwing them about.
I'm sorry, but just because WS has keyboard commands
doesn't make it superior. I've used it. Used WP, used pretty much EVERY word-processor, from time immemorial, dating back to the original Selectric II to the IBM OS/6. People like you like it because you DO NOT understand styles or their power, and the keyboard commands make certain things eaiser, once you've learned them. But WS is the least
mentally demanding, of pretty much ALL word-processors, and once you have the muscle memory--well, magic electronic typewriter and you don't have to know
anything else.
That's fine, I don't
expect you to change--but the truth is,
you missed it. You never understood what styles could and would do for you, so, honestly--you're not really qualified to judge Word or any other modern word-processor. I mean, as I said, to you, it's a magic typewriter. It's your work and you're the one stuck cleaning it up, so knock yourself out. Personally, I prefer to make my life infinitely easier by understanding--and using--the tools available to me.
Hitch