Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
If it works for them, more power to them. I know I write better without a GUI word processor because formatting gets in the way of my when putting words together. Whether it's "charming," or "eccentric" or an odd quirk, I don't care. It's what works for me. And, I'm guessing, what these successful writers you mentioned use what works for them. Why would you consider it "vapid" or "shallow" to choose what they like? Why this need for conformity? I would consider it more vapid and shallow to use the popular word processor just because it's popular.
For example I hate Word, always have. As far as I'm concerned it's clumsy crap – and no amount of peer pressure would ever induce me to use what I despise.
|
If you are the person that works with those manuscripts, to bring them to the public, after you're done, good for you. Doesn't matter. But for those of us that have to
work on these types of files, yes, it makes it far more work. I don't give two s**ts about
conformity for the sake of it. And popularity? Who said
anything about that?
(I wrote a big long reply to this and then realized that there was no polite way for me to discuss what I see daily, over the last decade and the >8,000 manuscripts we've received and reviewed, so I'm going to drop it.)
(BTW, I
too, in the 80's and early 90's,
loathed Word. Oh, it was so
terrible! it was clumsy crap! It didn't do this and it didn't do that, and it couldn't compare to Wordstar and Wordperfect and all that. It got everything "wrong" and yadda.
Oh, silly girl. I struggled along with it for several years, as I had clients that
insisted on using it, lecturing them
all the while about how this other product or WP was better, etc. And then, one day, I had this massive project--crafting some materials for a half-billion-dollar project I was managing--and I did something
SHOCKING!!! I actually took a short tutorial in it. Took me a whopping 3 hours to realize that Word had all these fantastic functions--if
you bothered to learn how to use it. Functions that made pretty much EVERYTHING better. Styles, headings, outline mode, the Document Map...man. THAT was eye-opening and what
really sucked was the mea culpa. Realizing that I could reorganize a 150K-word file, with thousands of paragraphs and headings with a click? Yowza. Not having to manually redo all that, b/c
Word did it easily? Lovely. Yup and all my preconceived notions about it were completely and totally wrong--by refusing to bother to actually learn it, for 3 years, I simply reinforced my
incorrect beliefs. I'm
sure that this doesn't apply to you, rcentros, but for any
other people reading this, that may have done what I did; tried Word and never bothered to learn it--if this is you, Gentle Reader,
you may want to try learning it. Makes a
world of difference.)
Hitch