Post date: Apr 9, 2016 1:25:07 AM
Ten reasons it’s better to be a writer today than 100 years ago
A blog post for April 8, 2016
I’ve been working since last summer on a major writing project: an essay about Iowa writer Ruth Suckow and her place in Midwestern Literature. So I have been gathering information, taking notes, and plugging ideas into an outline. I had my "ruff ruff" draft done last week, but still had some sources and ideas that I felt were missing. Now, a week later, I finished my first rough draft, but still need to polish my Chicago citations and find a way to cut 3,000 words! As I looked it over one more time this morning, it occurred to me that I am so thankful for modern technology. Ruth Suckow used an old manual typewriter so it was a lot of hard work and there was no such thing as "saving a file." How things have changed!
So here are ten reasons why I’m glad to be a writer today, not in 1916.
1. We have Computers! I remember my mother getting her first “word processor” back in the 1980s. It was hot stuff: it looked like an electric typewriter, only with a long narrow window across the top that let her see a few lines of her document. She could make a few corrections and save her work, but it was a very primitive media that she used. You couldn’t just walk out of the house with a little floppy disk and use it on any other typewriter. She would have loved our modern computers, iPad, and probably want a laptop—or better yet, the Microsoft Surface Pro.
2. We can save to the cloud! Google Drive rocks. I am using MS Word but taking time to save to the cloud on a regular basis. I’ve lived through one hard drive failure, and survived because I had paid attention to my smart husband’s counsel to save to Google Drive.
3. We have Spell check, grammar check, and word count! When your editor says you have a limit of 6,000 words, isn’t it nice to look down in the task bar and see the number of pages and words? I have 39 pages and 88 endnotes in my cleaned up rough draft.
4. We have citation tools. Speaking of end notes, I never thought I would say it, but I have used the built-in References tool to insert them into my manuscript, because Chicago style documentation is not my normal style (Oh, MLA, I miss you!).
5. We can use the web to do research! With a foot in a big black boot, I wasn’t very portable during my recuperation, so it was great to go online and find what I needed from my local libraries' web pages—including my college library.
6. We have Google! Google has digitized a lot of old journal articles and made them available—yea, Google! Who knew that I could find articles from the 1920s and 1930s via the internet from home?
7. We have websites that archive old articles like http://unz.org/ with access to old periodicals, books and authors.
8. We have--dare I say--Wikipedia, and other online reference tools like dictionaries. I found myself clicking on the articles that Mike and I had written about Ruth and Ferner to refresh my memory.
9. We can revise documents so much easier! We can move things around, delete sections, and change headers, etc. I don’t think it would be as much fun to grab a second legal pad and start over from scratch if you didn’t like the first draft.
10. We have a streamlined process for submitting work. No longer do we need to stagger to the Post Office with our 200 page manuscript: now we can upload it to our publisher’s website.
What are you thankful for?
Last Updated April 8, 2016