Just glance over the introduction again … In moments of weakness, Yes, I could press SHIFT+F5, but why don’t I Yet Microsoft Word opens everyīut none of them takes into account the extent of the temptation I face To read what I wrote at my last session before starting to write new And this hasĪnother of my personal writing distractions is the constant temptation The process of typesetting with the process of composition. Lead me to change it all again on another. Things are fickle, so changing fonts or font sizes one day would usually Rough writing day when I didn’t want to confront that question, I oftenįound myself wasting time on formatting, thinking that getting the To do with the most important one of all: What do you want to say? On a Or how about Courier-or what about Bookman Old Style? Is your pageīreaking at a funny spot? Why not adjust the margins, or the point size,Īll valid questions, in their own way. Processor like Word practically invites this-you can double-space, youĬan single-space-heck, you can 1.75 space.

One of mine isĪdjusting the “look” of a word processing document. In all the time I’ve used text editors, it’s never happened, evenĮveryone has their own writing tics and pathologies.

But let’s just put it this way (and here I’m beingĬharitable): in all my years of using Word, this happened more than

This only has to happen once to get you thinkingĪbout alternatives. Have you ever worked on a complicated section of a chapter or aįootnote, only to have Word crash for some unspecified reason and erase Occurred in a much different form: Why don’t I want to keep using Word?Īnd over time, that question became easier and easier to answer: 1. So for me, the question of why I would want to use plain text Wrote my dissertation in Microsoft Word, and started writing my book in Since 1971, you’re not coming to plain text in a vacuum. Unless your name is Ken Thompson and you’ve been happily typing away in Point of this post is about why I did it, with no apologies for theįact that many of these reasons may not be compelling to everyone. Still want) to write this way, using nothing more than a text editor and Want to focus on the specific, idiosyncratic reasons why I wanted (and Of course, what is possible is not always desirable, and in this post I It is possible to writeĪcademic publications in plain text, and in fact, Lincoln Mullen and I I’ve done the same thing now with aĬonference paper and journal article, too. Before submitting the manuscript to my press, I convertedĪll of my plain text files, complete with notes about what to italicizeĪnd where to place footnotes, to Microsoft Word documents using a simple In fact, I wrote the entirety of my academicīook, forthcoming in early 2013, in plain Insuperable obstacles for the academic historian who wants to use plain I’m writing this post partly to tell you that none of these are Want our work to be submitted as Word documents, not as text files. 1 Journals and academic presses generally Most of all, we need footnotes andĪll the bibliographic trappings that, “like the high whine of theĭentist’s drill,” assure the reader that we are serious professionalsĪnd have done our homework. We need the kinds of formatting-like boldface and italics-thatĭo not exist in a plain text file. Most of us still intend for our writing to end up on a printed Nonetheless, academic writers-and particularly historians-may wellīe skeptical about whether working in plain text can really work for In fact, I don’t even have to make the general caseįor using plain text here people like David Do a simple search for writing inĪnd you’ll find thousands of people making the case for using a fileįormat (*.txt) that worked long before Microsoft Word was a sparkle inīill Gates’s eye. These days, it seems like the ancient past of personal computing isīecoming the wave of the future.

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