Saturday, February 05, 2005
Moving my type
I'm writing for classes again, regularly week by week.
Much of the writing is done in Microsoft Word. Normally I use this on my Macintosh as well as the PC, though lately I've been a PC user here at my house as I've taken my G4 over to Susanne's to fill in the gaping computer hole we've had over there.
As soon as I'm regularly on my computer again, I'm going to check out the new open-source office productivity suite my darling brother told me about. In the meantime, you can check it out yourself. It's called, simly, Open Office.
The rest of my stuff is done online, through web postings. I love writing web postings. They have a completely different flavor for me than does anything else I type. I have had my share of webpostings disappear into the electronic void, so I, as much as anyone else, heed the warning to save my work in a wordprocessor. I cannot, however, actually compose my web postings in Word and then cut and paste them into Blackboard. Rather, I have to compose them in Blackboard and, before clicking on anything else, copy them into Word.
Composing in Word changes the voice, even just subtly. It alters how the words come out, the ways I try to make them mean, and the tone I take. I also find that I need to respond more directly to individuals on a web posting, that I desire more to make it an active dialogue that expects conversation than I do for the papers I produce for class. This feeling, this drive toward discursivity, is also in some way hampered when I compose in Word.
Of course this is partially the imposition of the mind, as there is nothing physically different about my process--I'm typing, after all, on the same desk, with the same books before me. But in another way, what you write into is just as important, affects how the words come out of you.
Much of the writing is done in Microsoft Word. Normally I use this on my Macintosh as well as the PC, though lately I've been a PC user here at my house as I've taken my G4 over to Susanne's to fill in the gaping computer hole we've had over there.
As soon as I'm regularly on my computer again, I'm going to check out the new open-source office productivity suite my darling brother told me about. In the meantime, you can check it out yourself. It's called, simly, Open Office.
The rest of my stuff is done online, through web postings. I love writing web postings. They have a completely different flavor for me than does anything else I type. I have had my share of webpostings disappear into the electronic void, so I, as much as anyone else, heed the warning to save my work in a wordprocessor. I cannot, however, actually compose my web postings in Word and then cut and paste them into Blackboard. Rather, I have to compose them in Blackboard and, before clicking on anything else, copy them into Word.
Composing in Word changes the voice, even just subtly. It alters how the words come out, the ways I try to make them mean, and the tone I take. I also find that I need to respond more directly to individuals on a web posting, that I desire more to make it an active dialogue that expects conversation than I do for the papers I produce for class. This feeling, this drive toward discursivity, is also in some way hampered when I compose in Word.
Of course this is partially the imposition of the mind, as there is nothing physically different about my process--I'm typing, after all, on the same desk, with the same books before me. But in another way, what you write into is just as important, affects how the words come out of you.
