(C) BoingBoing
Author Name: BoingBoing
This story was originally published on Boingboing.net. [1]
License: CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.[2]


Do "distraction-free" writing gadgets and apps work?

2021-12-20 00:00:00

Julian Lucas supplies today's illustration of Betteridge's Law of Headlines, on the subject of writing itself: "Can "Distraction-Free" Devices Change the Way We Write?"

I tried "distraction-free" writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die). Later, I tried coding my own writing tools, a hobby as rewarding as it was ineffective. The experiments gradually meshed into a literary Rube Goldberg machine, a teetering assemblage of Scriveners and SimpleTexts that left me perpetually uncertain of which thought I'd written down where. Longhand was a luxury I couldn't afford: Wendell Berry boasted in Harper's that he didn't need a computer, because he had a wife, but I was a mere urban freelancer, whose boyfriend had a job. So I continued the search for word processing's Excalibur, a perfect union of consciousness and composition.

A very well-written article! Gentle yet sharp: "focus mode on an everything device is a meditation room in a casino". If you (like me) are a frequent flyer with all this nonsense, see if you can guess which popular focus-writing app Lucas describes as "being trapped inside an inspirational quote" and which device he describes as "a console torn from the cockpit of a steampunk biplane."

At the risk of spoiling the story, I can't help myself: Lucas's endgame, after trying everything, turned out to be the AlphaSmart.
[END]

[1] URL: https://boingboing.net/2021/12/20/do-distraction-free-writing-gadgets-work.html
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

BoingBoing via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/rferl/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.