The Empirical Humanist

This arti­cle from Slash­dot caught my eye. He argues that “less is more” when it comes to com­put­ers and writ­ing. There are a lot of dis­trac­tions when one writes. Never mind the envi­ron­men­tal dis­trac­tions of tele­phones, inter­rup­tions and surf­ing the web. Word proces­sors have just too much eye candy and tempt the writer from doing his job: putting down words in a row.

So he gave up the fancy WYSIWYG word proces­sor with the spell checker, jus­ti­fied text, pag­i­na­tion, fonts and all the other fea­tures, and went back 20 years in Unix his­tory and chose vi, the Unix programmer’s text edi­tor. ¹ That was in 2003. Now this writer is con­sid­er­ing tak­ing a fur­ther step back in the his­tory of text edi­tors and aban­don­ing vi for ed, a line-​​oriented edi­tor where vi is screen-​​oriented.

The writer is now a nov­el­ist with a dri­ving need to grind out text. His cre­ativ­ity has become nar­rowly focused and so his text edit­ing needs have become sim­i­larly focused. Some of the Slash­dot folk accused him of being a roman­tic, which I do not find to be a flaw in a cre­ative writer. But other kinds of writing—such as essays, mono­graphs and other non-​​fiction genres—do not lend them­selves so well to nar­row focus. At least, that has been my experience.

Writ­ing an aca­d­e­mic paper or jour­nal arti­cle requires care­ful atten­tion to the flow of thought, evi­dence and logic. One must be care­ful to appro­pri­ately cite author­i­ties and sources. Some­times writ­ing text prompts thoughts about some­thing writ­ten ear­lier that needs amend­ment. I find myself review­ing what I’ve writ­ten ever so often in order to push the text on to the next step, kind of like mak­ing the run up to a broad jump. A screen-​​oriented text edi­tor like vi is min­i­mally nec­es­sary for such a writ­ing task; a mod­ern WYSIWYG word proces­sor such as Libre­Of­fice ² has many use­ful fea­tures. It also has many dis­tract­ing features.

My own pre­ferred means of writ­ing is with a text edi­tor. vi or emacs works for me. This is because I have found the most pow­er­ful word pro­cess­ing is done by TeX and friends, a type­set­ting sys­tem that takes care of the for­mat­ting at a later stage in the process of writ­ing. Since I work with lan­guages my text edi­tor (or word proces­sor, for that mat­ter) must be Uni­code compliant.

There is an impor­tant les­son here for writ­ers. Writ­ing is hard. It takes com­mit­ment and focus. One must set time aside and one must set a con­crete empir­i­cal goal—word count, for example–for each ses­sion of writ­ing. When one is writ­ing the first draft, the focus should be on new text; leave the review­ing for later. Yes, yes, yes! When extra­ne­ous thoughts occur to you, write them down and get them off your mind. But come quickly back to the task of putting new words down. You can even use a pow­er­ful word proces­sor by reduc­ing the dis­trac­tions: using the view­ing options, remove the tool– and scroll­bars, sta­tus infor­ma­tion and using the “full-​​screen” option. You will get as min­i­mal­ist an expe­ri­ence as with any text editor.