Return of the Plain Text


All of us today are web writers and graphic designers. Embracing that fact allows us to avail ourselves of all the tools that professionals in these areas have created for making their work easier. While I could write a whole host of articles about the uses of professional design software for academics, I’m going to limit myself to an unsuspecting candidate for widespread adoption: the plain text editor. Let me explain.

While Steve Jobs should be remembered for the democratization of digital type, the choices we have for formatting our documents has turned out to be too much of a good thing. Like with most technology, additional features often get in the way of core functionality. Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages can both do amazing things, but they also distract from the process of writing itself. Writers can learn a great lesson from web developers in this regard.

One thing that developers learned early on is the necessity of separating content from design. Only once the content is established, do we then play with different styles to determine what enhances the content. This is a very reasonable process and it clarifies the tasks in very definite ways.

Bring Minimalism to Your Writing Experience

The problem with all rich text formatting applications, like Microsoft Word and its ilk, is that they mash together content creation (writing) and design. This makes writing more cumbersome, because something in your brain tells you that you are writing and designing, when you really should just be writing. So stop futzing with font types and sizes, italics and line spacing, bullet lists and margins, hanging indents and first line indents. Just. Write. A simple way to do this is to return to the plain text editor. You will be surprised how much of your “writing” time was not actually writing but designing a document. By eliminating all the formatting options, plain text editors encourage immersion in the text and can greatly increase productivity. Here’s some more reasons why you should consider ditching rich for plain text.

These Aren’t Your Parents’ Plain Text Editors

Over the past few years, a ton of great plain text editors have appeared for OSX and Windows. So I’m not recommending that you go back to Notepad. My recent favorites are Atom (by Github) and Typora (by Abner). Both are free and support Markdown (which I will cover in a later post). Most importantly, these editors are beautiful to write in without having to do any formatting.  Both have light and dark themes depending on whether you are working during the day or night and full screen modes for distraction free writing. Other great editors are Sublime Text and Byword (Mac only).


Atom

Typora

Sublime Text

Byword

Play Nice with the Web

Another great reason to use plain text editors is that they are built for the web rather than print. For instance, have you ever had a perfectly formatted text created in Word (i.e., meant to be printed) and then copied it into the Blackboard WYSIWYG editor only to have it completely transform your content into a mashup of unintelligible gobbledygook? That happens because Blackboard is trying to translate your rich text design into HTML and CSS. If you use a plain text editor, you can sidestep that whole process. And if you want to add in some basic styling, you can integrate Markdown into your plain text and export as an HTML file, which can be copied into Blackboard.

A Light Footprint

The other good thing is that .txt files are incredibly lightweight since they aren’t bloated by formatting instructions, so you’ll save on storage, as well as overall system performance.

So, if you want to increase your writing productivity with a focused experience and create web ready documents that aren’t taxing on your computer, consider giving these text editors a spin.

Leave a Reply