WriteMonkey gets better and better

Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 28, 2013 at 09:08 AM

Cassius wrote:
I’m confused. What is “distracting” in Word, WordPad, etc.?
>Personally, I like to be able to BOLD, Italic, etc. I even used Word’s
>capabilities to change the toolbars, for example creating a “hanging
>indent” capability. Maybe my brain just works differently.

It is very likely that people differ in terms of their capacity to concentrate and their propensity to be distracted (like light sleepers vs. deep sleepers).

But also, you are describing a word processing task, not a creative writing task. There is a big difference between e.g. typing up the minutes of some meeting and formatting them, and sustained creative writing all day long, every single day, all year long.

Concentration becomes a very precious resource and anything that produces distraction (such as the “toolness” of the writing tool) undermines your productivity. In fact most formatting decisions and actions disrupt the focus on writing, which is why Markdown is great, as you don’t need to interrupt your typing to reach for the mouse when you need to make something bold or italics or turn into a block quote.