The ability to shift from content creation mode to editing mode mirrors for me the writing advice I often give students: you can't have your foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. Modal editors force you to think about editing and content generation as separate steps. A lot of young writers might benefit from this simple tool. (Admittedly, this also might qualify as cruel and unusual punishment. But I'm going to run with it.)

My own decades-long history of trying various writing platforms simmers underneath my previous post about the ubiquity of MS Word and Google Docs in the technological mindset of many students. I tend to use text editors for most everything nowadays: Vim, its variants, tools which have some sort of vim mode or tools which are based around some variety or species of markdown (write.as, hedgedoc, draftin, sublimetext, neovim, leanpub (markua), etc.). At first I thought maybe that was just contrarian affectation fter years in an academic community that takes writing seriously but also doesn't think all that critically about the technologies used for writing. But now I recognize that the inclination towards both modal editors and minimalist (or “distraction-free”) text tools is mostly about something more fundamental. It is about aligning tools with process.

One of the most common problems I see in student writers comes out in their written work as a sort of stiltedness or formality. Sometimes they aren't clear. Sometimes it seems like they're holding back. The symptoms can be many. But, upon discussing their process with them, how they arrived at this not-quite-right bit of prose, they usually say some variant of the same thing. They describe a back and forth, constantly trying to say something but then worrying about whether that was the right thing to say, whether it was formatted properly, whether they had their details right. It's the typical writer's dilemma, weighed down by the pressure of doing something for a class, where the stakes seem both higher and, in other ways, trivial and unconnected to their lives. (I note in passing that this is often a misconception. They are used to writing what the teacher wants and so have a bit of a mental block until freed of their assumption that writing in a class is for the teacher more than it is for them.)

There are many remedies and aids to help students who are stalling out their writing by trying to push forward while at the same time cutting back, braking and accelerating in fits and starts. Peter Elbow is a good starting point and I have used his freewriting exercises in many classes over the years. There are technology aids with distraction free writing or “typewriter”/“hemingway” modes that prevent erasing. And there are plenty of methods to walk students through structured steps of writing and editing. Recently, for example, as design thinking has vied for widespread applicability, there is the inevitable application to writing (one example of many: https://medium.com/8px-magazine/design-thinking-through-the-writing-process-9075d56db517). What design thinking offers, like any method, is a clear plan for sequestering the idea-making and creation (“ideating” and “prototyping” in DT-speak) from the editing step (aka “testing”).

Like these approaches, modal text editing offers a scaffolding which can separate steps of writing, putting the mind at ease that one does not have to do everything right now. The distinction between an editing mode and an insert mode reinforces the distinction that many students could use between generating content and editing that content.

Fairly high bar perhaps? The learning curve for vim is notoriously “high”:

But there are in fact only a few commands that one needs to do the kind of editing that most students do to their writing. Cut/paste and moving around are the basics. There are some good learing aids too, for example https://www.openvim.com/ and https://vim-adventures.com/, and many, many tutorials (e.g. https://danielmiessler.com/study/vim/). There are plenty of folks who use things like vim for writing more than just code. Writers have adopted vim in various ways. See, e.g. https://hackernoon.com/vim-for-writers-ee15d2a8f512 and https://www.naperwrimo.org/wiki/index.php?title=Vim_for_Writers via NaNoWriMo.

So I'm a big fan of Vim and its descendants. But I'm an even bigger fan of vim-mode in various other applications. Tools with built-in vim bindings or vim-mode are, I think, the easiest on ramp for using modal editing to help think about how one writes. One of my favorite ways to use vim bindings is with the browser, including with vimium, most likely the easiest way to get vim bindings into the hands of students right away. I appreciate too tools like hedgedoc, where a vim mode is built in (just switch the selector at the bottom of the editor pane).

I recognize that this may not be for a lot of folks. But I think with certain students it might resonate with them and help them think about the particular issue they are having. At a minimum, it can help make cutting and pasting stand out in the editing process. It can also help isolate rearrangement as a part of the process (For student writing, often a lot can be gained simply by taking the last paragraph or sentence and moving that to the front of a paper. It is a semi magical trick to them, usually with good results.)

And if modal editing is too much work, well then I suppose we can always just remove the backspace key to get the point across.

#vim #minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #writing #writingtools

Ah, the word processor. It's ubiquitous both in business and in schools. I was reminded of how easy it is take word processing for granted by two activities colliding: 1. reading Matthew Kirschenbaum's “literary history” of word processing and 2. finding out (again) that my students are aware of no other word processing or text-creating tools beyond MS Word or Google Docs.

That text production has become synonymous with Word is, as ever, deeply troubling. It is also prompt for a very simple teaching suggestion useful for students at all levels.

Try a different program for text editing with students. Explore its capabilities, audience, function, and history.

This is, in one sense, good old “mediation,” changing the medium as a way to think through critical features. Seeing other options can be ho-hum for some, mind-blowing for others. In both cases it's an easy stepping stone to technological criticism.

As so much critical work makes clear, software like MS Word encodes a set of assumptions about the world, about its users and audience; it conditions the kind of product that is produced; and it stores its data in a particular format that impacts how that data can be shared, transmitted, and preserved. Using something — anything — else quickly exposes those assumptions by highlighting contrasts and shared features.

Some possibilities

• Lowest bar: Even opening up a discussion about affordances and constraints between Word and something like Google Docs (or its imitators and alternatives) can be a starting point for the assumptions that our word processing tools bring to our work.

• To illustrate open source vs. proprietary software, one easy choice is to look at LibreOffice, OpenOffice or WPS Office. Each is a clone of sorts and, beyond being shocked to find that these “free” tools exist, students can also be shocked to find that they work pretty darn well.

• https://plaintextproject.online/

An excellent site but also, for students, an instructive site that will beg the question of their assumptions. Even if they aren't sold on plain text tools and they would prefer to have more buttons and stick with their .pages and .docx files, it's a great and practical starting point for critical thinking around text.

One of the nice things that the contrast with plaintext does is to help students think about big questions (“What is a text?”) and practical questions at the same time (i.e. are our tools determined by our peers and our communities? Are word processing tools a matter of identity?)

• To illustrate more about data formats, text editors provide a good point of contrast. Sublime text or atom (or any coding editor) raises questions of why it is that Word stores data in the format it does. (Or, notepad in windows, etc— there's always some form of simple text editor to play with.) What's different about a plain .txt file?

• As so much use is made nowadays of markdown, tools like typora or hedgedoc or, frankly, a whole bunch of other tools for other purposes (Trilium notes, github, etc.) are both an easy way to introduce markup languages and an illustrative lesson in standards (i.e. because markdown suffers from a variety of flavors -cf. asciidoc, markua).

Markdown also makes for a handy lesson in the difficulties of encoding form along with content, in issues of data classification and separation generally. HTML or coding formats like JSON are illustrative of this as well.

• And we haven't even gotten to modal text editors and questions of modeless UI. In addition to, potentially, some frustration, modal text editing tends to blow students' minds, particularly if they have little experience of coding. Vim (or NeoVim) or kakoune will feel foreign but also, perhaps, revealing, of their assumptions about what it means to type. (For vim, a good starting point, before getting to the editor itself, is https://vim-adventures.com/.) How do these kinds of text tools compare not just with something graphical like MS Word but even with other text-based programs like nano? (Note that Vim and emacs can both easily be installed in Windows and Mac versions. There is also a handy way to explore vim mode in many programs, e.g. hedgedoc).

One easy way to explore these different platforms, their similarities and differences, is to try copying first (rather than composition). See what it's like to put a favorite poem or section of a book into that text editor or word processor. Does it change where you put your attention as you write? How much does it matter that something is hard (at first) or not?

(One last sidebar: tools like scrivener or manuskript, or other platforms for specific kinds of writing are another way to explore this question of medium. So too blogging platforms are yet another way.)

Retro computing

• Text editors (vs. word processors) provide perhaps the easiest way into learning a bit about the history of computing. Check out some retro computing online, for example at winworld for old windows programs. For the legendary wordstar, for example: https://winworldpc.com/product/wordstar/7

Or try out some emulators for old tech, e.g. https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ for the classic Mac.

(Students may well already have a point of reference if they've ever used or come across retro game console emulators).

• Similarly, if you have a bit of retrotech lying around, like say, a typewriter, it can also be illustrative (and fun!) to let students compare what it is like to work through that mechanical technology. Different keyboards too — small, big, mechanical — all help illustrate the question. What difference does it make what tools we use for writing?

History and Ethics

There's an ethics and philosophy lesson here. Why does Microsoft charge for its software in the way that it does? What does it mean to license rather than own software? What's at stake in the open or libre software movement by contrast?

Finally, there's a history lesson in all of this. Why is it that MS Word is the default? Why is it that these other tools exist in the first place? (Vim and emacs provide a history of early computing in miniature perhaps.)

MS Word and its siblings (Powerpoint, etc.) dominate nowadays. Students are rarely aware of alternatives and are often locked in not by choice, but simply because it is taken for granted that these are the tools they will use to complete assignments or do presentations or the like.

There is, in the end, a lesson about choice and volition in this as well. Do you choose to use this tool because it is the right tool for what you need to do? Or do you use it for other reasons, often unseen and invisible?

All from the humble, ubiquitous word processor.

#minimalistedtech #edtechmininalism #word #wordprocessor #texteditor #vim