What an Article! “Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish”

[iPersuade]

I agree with nearly every word of this. I used and loved WordPerfect 5.1. When Word for Windows for Windows 2.0 came out, WordPerfect was doomed. I still miss the reveal codes, but Word’s integration among its office suite, the start of ODBC data sharing, and the WYSIWYG power of Word quickly made it rise to the spot of king. I have written before about how MS Word contributed greatly to my developing/becoming a writer: See, e.g.,

Microsoft Word Celebrates Its 40th Anniversary

I’ve come to dislike MS Word, but I have to give credit where it is due. Microsoft Word turned me into a writer. I may be rehashing a story that I’ve recounted here before, I can’t recall. When I started college in 1992, I had to take the basic college freshman writing courses. I didn’t think I could write—and generally proved myself correct. Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0 came out, and I was ecstatic for it. I was coming from WP 5.1 and was dying for a proper Windows word processor. I bought …

I wrote in that post how I’ve come to dislike Word, but that is such a nuanced dislike. As a lawyer, I use it virtually every day. I have been irritated with Microsoft for not pushing the iPad version more and for not fixing a bug that has ruined a number of my documents. I cancelled my office subscription in protest, and then gave up and re-subscribed a month or so later. That probably offers two key insights into why I some dislike for Word. I don’t like that I seemingly have to use it because the tool is the standard in my world. I’d prefer to be able to have documents that are tool agnostic, but that is not my world. Additionally, I don’t like that Microsoft has bloated Word and made it less enjoyable to use as a writing tool in some respects. The advent of the ribbon has done more to slow my work down then any UI element in modern computing. Okay, that might be a stretch.

But Word works, works well, and enables lots of diverse uses, users, and workflows. In terms of reliability, in the old days, corrupt documents were common. It’s different, vastly different today. Other than this absurd iPad problem I’ve had saving Word files in certain locations (e.g., iCloud), I don’t think I’ve had a document corrupted to the point of data loss in Word in probably a decade. I have had formatting corruptions which sometimes require nuke and pave—a problem Wordperfect’s reveal codes almost never struggled with. But the nuke and pave problem may slow me down, but I haven’t fundamentally lost any data.

Here is the only place I really depart from your take, and only in part.

@rkaplan

All this talk about formatting taking away from the thought process of writing is total BS. For two reasons - (a) For many people, the design is part of the message - thus it is all done simultaneously in Word; (b) For those who prefer focusing solely on text initially, nobody is forcing you to use any of the formatting features. Alternatively, you are welcome to write your first-draft in TextEdit or BBEdit or whatever barebones text editor you wish and then import it to Word

I have wasted tons of time playing with MS Word formatting when I should be focusing on editing my sentences. I know others who struggle with that. Design of documents is important, I agree with that. But I don’t think clients’ should pay for lawyers to be changing margins and font choices. The problem is not that best feature of Word—WYSIWYG—is also its greatest curse. The ability to play with formatting and design become an almost irresistible urge to design rather than write. That may not be a problem for everybody, but it is for me.

To solve that problem, I’ve written entire documents in emails for my assistant or the word processing team to put into Word. I’ve written entire documents in Apple Notes, too, before sending them to Word. My favorite non-Word place to work on complex documents is Scrivener, of course. But even Scrivener eventually filters down to Word. I still dictate, and am working on doing more of that thank you to the combination of AI translation features for audio recordings, the action button on my iPhone, and having a voice memos complication on my watch. But I digress.

I also agree that some of the problem with Word is not Word but lack of training and misusing it. I think I posted somewhere here before that when i first started working, we used Word for every kind of computing task you could imagine: Database, spreadsheet, to do lists, photo collage, scratch notes, and more. Word was the Swiss army knife.

The fact is that Word is substantially more powerful and useful than Markdown is for the business world and everyone who is not power user, or web-centric writer. And people like to format their documents.

I myself tried the plain text experiment for a while: emails; notes to self; reading notes; to do lists; etc. It’s great! It’s fast! It’s totally searchable in the file system. Sure, maybe. But it looks horrible (using a bunch of asterisks to imitate bolding, for example); it’s annoying to read; it obscures important content; and it decreases overall comprehension. There is a reason we all stopped using the Pine e-mail client.

I agree, Word has earned pride of place. Overall, I think it earned it on the merits. Word would have never become what it is today, if people truly hated using it or vastly preferred something else.