Why You Should Write in Plain Text

The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. That is the claim I shall defend below. It will probably strike you as bizarre at first sight. If I am against word processors, what do I propose: that we write in longhand, or use a mechanical typewriter? No. While there are things to be said in favor of these modes of text preparation I take it for granted that most readers of this essay will do most of their writing using a computer, as I do. My claim is that there are much better ways of preparing text, using a computer, than the word processor. The wording of my claim is intended to be provocative, but let me be clear: when I say word processors are stupid I am not saying that you, if you are a user of a word processor, are stupid. I am castigating a technology, but one that is assiduously promoted by the major software vendors, and that has become a de facto standard of sorts. Unless you happen to have been in the right place at the right time, you are likely unaware of the existence of alternatives.

For the past several years, I've increasingly avoided word processing apps. Sure, I have iWork Pages and Microsoft Word 2011 on my Mac. Pages is a beautiful app for laying out formatted documents, and Word, well, is a necessary evil, especially when you're in college. But I hardly ever type directly into either. Instead, almost everything I write is written in plain text, in iA Writer or Typerighter, then saved to Simplenote or just as a plain text file in Dropbox or iCloud.

If it's getting published online, then I'll put it in WordPress and add the HTML it needs. If it's getting submitted to college or someone else as a Word document, then I can format the text there. But the most import thing is, my text is always just plain text. It's searchable, will always work on any computer, and never needs converted into another newer format. It's just text, and it always works.

Plus, it's so much less distracting to write in plain text, and not have to mess with formatting. Just get a minimilist plain text writing app, and write away.

Amazing this essay was written over a decade ago, and yet only recently are most people starting to see that they actually don't have to have a word processor to write.

Link: "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient" by Allin Cottrell, on 29 Jun 1999. Via @ia

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