What a Writer Should be Thankful For: The Word Processor

It doesn’t matter which one you use, the fact of the matter is that the word processor has made our lives a whole lot easier. Sure, the spell and grammar check sucks on a lot of them because they don’t read in context or slang, but it has saved us in the long run.

Let’s go back to the time where all we had was pen and paper. While that was wonderful in and of itself, if we say… wanted to give our novels a complete overhaul, that meant writing the entire thing over, by hand, and God forbid you messed up or coffee spilled on it. So that meant a writer didn’t have the luxury of making as many mistakes as they wanted because they could always go back and revise three or four times. They could, but it would take a while.

Fast forward to the day of the typewriter. Well, it’s not as hard to write since typing is much faster than handwritten stuff. But I dare you to type without a bottle of whiteout handy. Not only that, but still think long and hard about addition and edits because one more line means retyping the entire chapter. Man that’s a lot of white out and paper, that means more money spent on paper and not to mention ink! I’m a college student now and I’d be flat out broke if I tried to write like this.

Fast forward to the age of the word processor people and get down on your knees and thank the heavens! Sure the spell check is lacking and we still have to self edit to catch typos and junk, but we can edit on a whim now. It’s only a matter of select all, paste in a new document and get to ripping your own works to shreds. If you don’t like the changes, undo goes a long way, or just go back with the backup you saved. It’s that simple. Add a line if you want. Add as thousand. And guess what? Only print when you absolutely need to, which means no need for ink to type anymore. Of course, you have to remember to save, but the autosave on recent processors have been nothing less than a lifesaver, particularly if you’re still using a desktop and the lights go out on you.

Want to change the name of a character? No longer do we need to search the entire document and manually change it. The find and replace is your best friend… for those kinds of things. And page numbering and headers have never been easier. If you add a new page, they adjust accordingly. Not only has it never been easier to writer, edit, and organize a story, it makes writing essays for school a lot easier. While we’re at it, let’s just be thankful for the computer. But alas, I’d be typing all day for the reasons to be thankful for that. Computers are self explanatory.

But because we love to complain about our processors (myself included). I thought I’d remind us exactly why we should be thankful for them. They made the life of a writer so much easier. Three cheers for the word processor!