Avoid word processors if you want to get things written

Some poor guy wrote a review of 14 word processors. I didn’t attempt to read any of it. Look, if you’re worried about mail merge or cramming spreadsheets into your document, use a word processor. If you want to get down to the business of writing, use a text editor. Writing is hard. It takes focus and discipline.¹ The last thing you need are Word’s 7,239 features yelling for attention. I do all my writing in WriteRoom because it’s nothing but my words: no menus, no window chrome, and no operating system.² You’re forced to confront the empty page instead of prematurely optimizing bullet styles for unordered lists. WriteRoom screenshot It seems that the importance of word processors is waning since we now do the bulk of our writing in email clients and HTML text areas. If you’re creating a formal document or something to be printed, get your thoughts out with the simplest text editor you have, then start fiddling with your page margins in Word.

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1. Two excellent books about writing: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and On Writing Well by William Zinsser.
2. While you’re at it, turn off the annoying squiggly red lines that warn you of misspellings. You’ll spell check and proofread later, so don’t let anything get in the way of your flow.

Obligatory screenshot of Word 2007 feature bloat: