Reports from the Electronic Fronter:Writing Tools, Part 1 Tom Maddox In an earlier column ("Time, Space, and Modems," April, 1993 Locus) I talked about modems in general and one brand in particular, and did so in ways that could reasonably be regarded as "reviewing" modems. As I look back at doing that, I realize that the process made made me uneasy, so I want to issue a kind of consumer alert about this column and the next. In them I'll be writing about software, and what I do could likewise be construed as "reviewing" software, which could in turn lead to some inappropriate expectations on the part of the reader, who might expect me to guide the discriminating consumer by making a purportedly objective analysis of the merits and demerits of the products. For instance, when a magazine such as PC Magazine or MacUser trots out the latest and word processors, they subject them to a battery of standardized "tests." You know, "To evaluate the search capabilities of SuperWord Nova for MacWindows, we asked it to find and replace ten thousand instances of the word gullible user in a ten megabyte file," that sort of thing. Well, I won't be doing any of that. To begin with, I suspect that the phrase "discriminating consumer" is an oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp" and "science fiction." Most consumers (me very much included) are discriminating in the same way as the customers at Yolanda's Whorehouse & Thrift. That is to say, they might wonder whether to go for the redhead in the lime teddy or having done so, if it's wise to pay the extra tariff for the Compassionate Monkey or to be a cheapskate and settle for a Wax Job, but they aren't really "critical" or "discerning," to pass along a couple of synonyms from the American Heritage Electronic Dictionary 1.1; they just want to get off as much as possible for their money. While I understand the compelling quality of this want (or need--you be the judge), I don't know that you should consider me qualified to assist you in this kind of tough decision. So I'll go ahead and tell you what I think about these things, but do take it all with a certain amount of skepticism. Also, I believe that the best advice with regard to computers and writing is simply, don't get involved anymore than you want to. I suppose acquiring some word processor or another is a good idea- -many, probably most, of us who write professionally have done so, and few of us want to go back, certainly not to the days of Selectrics and painstaking correction of every typing error by hand. But the truth is, quite a few writers do very well by cranking out whatever it is they produce by hand and then having some paid drone transfer everything to the typed or word-processed page. The ugly truth about computers and writing is that it's a damned slippery slope out there--like the one we are often told leads from marijuana smoking to shooting up heroin, cocaine, and toilet cleaner--and I'm here to testify about it (the one involving computers, I hasten to add, not wishing to become a statistic in the War on Some Drugs, as John Perry Barlow calls it). Though I'm neither wealthy nor the sort of computer columnist who gets vast quantities of hardware and software laid on him on the off chance that he'll say something nice about it, I have lots of very nice and quite expensive software: some purchased, some given to me for review--not only much more than I need but also much more than I can actually use. Word processors in profusion, outliners, text analysis and search programs, dictionaries and thesauruses, freeform databases, indexers, text readers: My name is Tom, and I'm a software addict. All together now: Hi, Tom. Then I have to give you the reminder that a moment's reflection should reveal to you anyway: using computers won't solve any of the difficult problems entailed in writing. For instance, if you have the linguistic prowess of George Bush with jet lag and on a Prozac overdose, that new copy of Grammatik won't give you a graceful style. If you can't think straight, no outline program will do more than help you restructure your incoherence. And if you are, God help you, blocked, no program of any sort will unlock the dread within you. So okay, I've warned you. I won't be objective, and I won't tell you how to get the most for your money,and what I tell you probably won't do you much good and could actually get you hooked. However, I'm going to talk to you about computers and writing anyway because I've been interested in the topic for a few years now from the points-of-view of both writer and writing teacher. I might say something you'll find interesting or useful, but do remember,we're consenting adults here, so don't blame me if you,for your own reasons, spend far more than you can afford on something you can't use or, worse yet, something that actually impairs your writing or drives you crazy. Despite all I've just said, the truth is, I do write on a computer, just about all the time--though there are exceptions, which I'll talk about later--and I wouldn't want to go back to either a Selectric or some other more primitive technology. And as I've already indicated, almost everyone I know who has taken the big leap into "word processing" over the past decade has stuck with it. Why is this? Well, to belabor the obvious for a moment or two,when writing on a computer you can change things painlessly and move them around equally painlessly. This encourages not only trivial revision of the "that" to "which" variety (though for those of us ancient enough to remember typing with carbons, this in itself has a certain magic) but also the sort of structural revision that good writing demands. Sentences, paragraphs, arbitrarily designated sections can disappear and reappear wherever you want them. In addition, you can locate things easily, and change them if you wish. Even the simplest word processors have a search and replace capability of some kind. Cut-and-paste, search-and-replace: for me, these define word-processing and show why we use it. However, beyond these essential capabilities, things get complicated, even strange. Some programs have so many "features" that no single living human has ever actually employed all of them (which is probably just as well, given that quite a few of them don't work quite as advertised anyway), while others include ways of working with text that are impossible on paper (such as outliners and hypertext programs of various kinds). Let's get the topic of writing processors out of the way quickly. For me to recommend any of them for any particular system would be as sensible and compelling as recommending a political party and religious affiliation; also, while I'm at it, I might as well tell you who should marry your favorite child. In fact, choosing a word processor is a somewhat contingent decision for most people--typically determined by factors such as what you can afford--but tends to be a lasting one. Once you get used to a program's quirks, little and big, it's hard to change. You get used to Word Perfect's assignment of function keys or Microsoft Word's nesting of menus, and your hands and mind grow comfortable together performing the tasks you ordinarily perform. You don't think about doing whatever it is; you just do it, and you live with the limitations, oddities, and maddening difficulties of your word processor--I'll forego any extended analogies with marriage, politics, or religion, leaving these as an exercise for the reader. So what should you do if you're considering buying a word processor? I don't know, but I can outline a plausible strategy. You might get one that is fairly current in terms of existing technology, such as one of the crop of "----- for Windows" products in the Microsoft-compatible world or one of the System 7-using products in the Macintosh world. If these strike you as prohibitively expensive, or the hardware you can afford simply won't run them, then go for old standards, assuming you can get them at bargain rates, which you should be able to do. In short, go current technology or go cheap. So there you are--you've got a copy of the original CP/M WordStar and are running it on a machine that takes twelve minutes to move from the beginning to the end of a 10k file, but you got the whole package in trade for a defective K-Mart torque wrench, or you have WordPerfect 10.0 for Windows, which requires twenty megabytes of RAM and fifty megabytes of disk space in order to load a half- page memo on your 586 FuehrerSystem, and you got the package for just under five grand. Either way you're happy: you've beat the system by getting a great bargain, or you've had a major consumer orgasm--it's like the Compassionate Monkey and the Wax Job all at once. 20 True the happiness doesn't last long because consumerism, like rust, never sleeps, but the main thing is, you've consumed products, and you're ready to put your products to some good use. What now, eh? Think: what would you like to do in the course of your writing that seems likely to be doable on a computer? Index your articles or books? Throw all the notes you've taken on various subjects into a big electronic heap and have them accessible in some orderly fashion? Get some sort of insight into your stylistic quirks? Structure the process of generating and organizing your writing, either fiction or non-fiction? These things are, to various degrees, possible, and a few others as well. So far as I am concerned, the real advance in computer manipulation of text is the outliner, also known (in the world of text editors) as a folding editor. The outliner imposes other levels of structure on a text. First it creates a hierarchical structure, the "outline" format that we were all taught (almost always with dubious results) in grammar school. It can look like this: Word Processing I. Strengths A. Cut-and-paste B. Search-and-replace II. Weaknesses A. Encourages delusions of grandeur B. Costs more than pen and paper Equally, though, it could look like this:1.Word Processing 1.1. Strengths 1.1.1. Cut-and-paste 1.1.2. Search-and-replace 1.2. Weaknesses 1.2.1. Encourages delusions 1.2.2. Costs more than pen and paper Or like this: Word Processing Strengths Cut-and-paste Search-and-replace Weaknesses Encourages delusions Costs much more than pen and paper. Or it could assume any number of formal appearances,depending on the outliner's capabilities and yourimagination. However, an outliner does not simply format text. It allows you to treat the parts of an outline as modules--easily movable units--that can be quickly moved around like puzzle pieces on a tabletop, and it allows you to see only as deeply into the contents of a module as you wish. For instance, using a piece of the pseudo-outline above, as an example, we might have:Strengths Cut-and-paste Search-and-replaceThis simple structure might be "unfolded" to reveal:Strengths Cut-and-paste Well, to belabor the obvious for a moment or two, when writing on a computer you can change things painlessly and move them around equally painlessly. 20 This encourages not only trivial revision of the "that" to "which" variety (though for those of us ancient enough to remember typing with carbons, this in itself has a certain magic) but also the sort of structural revision that good writing demands. Sentences, paragraphs,arbitrarily designated sections can disappear and reappear wherever you want them. 20 And the good outliners make this process fast and intuitive. They allow you to see as much detail as you wish, to hide as much as you wish. For the Macintosh, where this kind of program has flourished, the two most commonly seen outliners are More (current version 3.1, available from Symantec Corporation, 10201 Torre Avenue, Cupertino, CA 95014;phone 408/253-9600) and Acta 7. More has a panoply of outlining bells-and-whistles and in addition functions as a so-called "presentation" program--which is to say you can use it to present automated or semi-automated versions of computer slide shows. Acta 7 provides the basic properties of an outliner and comes pretty cheap. For MSDOS machines, the only outliner I have used is an old standby, PC-Outline (which has been in version 3.34 for some time now). It is shareware, available on many electronic bulletin boards and the usual ftp sites on the Internet. It functions as a memory-resident program, provides the usual outliner capabilities, and in general is solid. Microsoft Word has an outline mode which provides most outliner functions, while WordPerfect 5.1 has a lame outline mode that serves mostly to format text automatically. An obvious attribute of this approach is that it encourages linear, hierarchical thinking--the sort that is generally held up as exemplary for most kinds of writing (fictive and poetic writing excepted, at least to a degree). I said that cut-and-paste encourages structural revision; clearly, an outliner does so more powerfully. Lately, some interesting breeds of pseudo-outliners have been striving for success in the world red in tooth and claw of commercial software. They convert prose into modules as an outliner does, but they try to make possible a non-hierarchical presentation of text. Examples for the Macintosh include Inspiration, Storyspace, and the late (and lamented by quite a few)Thought pattern. They can present not only the hierarchical structure of the outliner but also what might be called a decentered structure, one where the elements of the outline are presented simultaneously across a two-dimensional field. The example from Storyspace (which I wrote about in "I Sing the Text Electric, Part 2," December, 1992 Locus) in Figure 1 shows how this works. Here we have a few characters, an event, and a place, all from what we might call a hypothetical story--one that I am pretending to be writing. They are laid out on the screen, each to its own box (or "space" in the Storyspace lexicon), some with connections in the form of lines drawn to other boxes. Some of the connections are named, some not. Using the program, I can easily rearrange the relationships and connections, add new ones, delete some or all existing, and so on. I can nest boxes within boxes (thus achieving hierarchical structure) and can write in each of the boxes (in a special text window). Hierarchy disappears horizontally and vertically; moreover, it is subsumed internally: I put spaces within spaces, and I can connect those spaces in myriad ways. The result? Hypertext: instead of linear form, multi- dimensional form; or the outline as Ourouboros, with many tails in many mouths. Storyspace is available from Eastgate Systems, Inc. (P. O. Box1307,Cambridge, MA 02238, phone 800-562- 1638).[Insert Figure 1] Inspiration differs in its intent. While Storyspace aims toward the creation of hypertext, Inspiration bills itself as "a thought processor" and "visual thinking tool." Storyspace is strong on creating complex hypertextual relationships among its "spaces," Inspiration at manipulating and presenting complex images. Inspiration obviously attempts to implement techniques such as "clustering," "mind-mapping," and "concept mapping." 20 There is a whole literature about these notions, much of it concerned with "right- brain thinking" and dedicated to providing effective techniques for "enhancing creativity." Some folks find such techniques enormously helpful during the early stages of writing or thinking-- the brainstorming stages, if you will. If you are interested, call Inspiration Software at 503/245-9011 and ask for a demo version of the program. For me as a writer, all these programs--call them extended editors- -create a new "writing space," in Jay David Bolter's words, which he defines as "the physical and visual field defined by a particular technology of writing" (Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,1991). When I use an outliner, I feel that my relationship to the structure of what I write has shifted, that I am thinking much more of blocks of text. Bolter's comments on this reinforce my view:[I]n using an outline processor, writers are not aware of a rigid distinction between outlining and prose writing: they move easily back and forth between structure and prose. What is new is that the points of the outline become functional elements in the text, because when the points move, the words move with them. In this way the computer makes visible and almost palpable what writers have always known: that the identifying and arranging of topics is itself an act of writing. Outliners can encourage student writers (and by extension, all writers) to think of outlining as an integral part of the writing process. As many writing teachers will tell you, this is one of the great struggles of teaching writing because that well has often been thoroughly poisoned: an outline being to many students a formal and irrelevant array of letters and numbers an English teacher insists (apparently for purely occult reasons) should be attached to such documents as term papers. To put it another way, the outliner shows writers to regard the outline as an aid to the writer, not to the reader. Thus behind the high technology and its accompanying jargon one can thus find a simple tool of practical assistance to the writer. By way of closing, a couple of items: I have further news of Bernard Aboba's The BMUG Guide to Bulletin Boards and Beyond, which is threatening to become a monthly item in this column. As I reported last month, the BMUG edition is unavailable.However, a new edition is in the works from Addison-Wesley, under the title of The Online User's Encyclopedia: Bulletin Boards and Beyond (ISBN: 0-201-62214-9, $32.95, no firm release date) and it will be expanded by three hundred pages. You can also get an on demand-printed copy of the first edition for $29.95 plus$5.00 handling from Mailcom, 5337 College Avenue, Suite326, Oakland, CA 94618. Finally, updates to the first edition are available on the Planet BMUG Bulletin Board(call BMUG at 510/549-2684 for information on accessingPlanet BMUG) and an Internet ftp site,netcom1.netcom.com (login anonymous), in the directory/pub/mailcom. And here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's address in Washington: 666 Pennsylvania Avenue, S. E.,Washington, DC 20003. Cheap thrills for all you Fundamentalist folks out there, and doesn't it just confirm what you've felt all along? Internet address: tmaddox@netcom.com ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .