Word Processing Is Not Writing ⭐

John Warner and other writers have correctly observed that writing is thinking. It's a way of expressing ideas as they occur, reordering and rewriting as needed, and transforming those ideas into more concrete thoughts and arguments throughout. Put another way, a writer writes first for themselves. Once the ideas they express are more structured and complete, they share that writing with others.

If you've ever written by hand using pen or pencil and paper, or typed on a mechanical or electric typewriter, you know how painful that process can be. Editing is particularly difficult and often requires starting over and manually rewriting words on a new sheet of paper. The appeal of software-based word processor apps running on personal computers was originally tied to the relative elegance of writing and editing in these environments, but that was compared to the primitive tools of a previous era. As word processors became more powerful and capable, formatting took precedence over writing. Microsoft Word and other word processor apps retrained our brains to think about how a document looked rather than on the clarity of the ideas one wants to express.

How did we get here? After all, word processor apps like Microsoft Word are the benefactors of a millennium of evolution that dates back to prehistoric man smearing blood and ash on their faces and bodies and writing and painting on cave walls, a very human desire to share one's thoughts and ideas with others. These things should only get better with time.

And they did, at least for a while.

The earliest word processor apps appeared on the earliest personal computers in the late 1970s. These apps mimicked and improved on the standalone word processor devices that predated PCs and personal computing, just as those devices mimicked and improved on the mechanical and electric typewriters that preceded them.

Those early computers were text-based, like their spiritual predecessors, or at least provided text-based displays in which graphics were used sparingly or not at all. And so the first word processor apps, like Electric Pencil, WordStar, and WordPerfect, were exclusively text-based as well. They displayed and produced text, or what we might today call plain text to differentiate it from formatted or rich text.

Even the earliest word processor apps offered various functional advantages over their device-based predecessors. Unfortunately, they were also difficult to use and master because of their non-discoverable features and the myriad of specific keyboard shortcuts they required.

To address the obvious usability issues, some word processing apps provided on-screen help and, in time, text-based menu systems modeled on those found in the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that began appearing in the 1980s. There were also attempts to approximate the "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) capabilities of GUIs in which the finished version of a document--typically printed on paper...