How We Research and Draft NowHow We Research and Draft Now

The web has radically changed how we research and plan and draft our writing. It’s happened over 20 years so we haven’t always noticed just how immense the change has been. From a time when libraries and pads of rough yellow newsprint paper were what was needed to start writing till now,where Google,a computer and wordprocessing capabilites are the starting point,our writing process is utterly changed.

I’m not going to go over the many ways word processing makes life easier for writers,except to mention 2 aspects:

1. The spellchecker! Oh how I love it. I’m a little dyslexic and struggle with the spelling of some words. Is it “a”or “e”or “o”before an “r”? And is it one letter or two there in the middle of a word? (I believe the spellchecker has actually improved my spelling because it alerts me,when I’m wrong,with red underlining or squiggles,and then,if I right click,gives me the correct answer. Sometimes I even use it as a test;when I see the red,I try to correct it without right-clicking);and the other useful word processor tool is -
2. The really helpful but little known Styles. A few years ago I made a short screencast to illustrate how easy it was to use,and how helpful for writing long documents. If you’re curious,take a look -

http://www.screencast.com/users/JoanVinallCox/folders/Jing/media/ef8e1a8a-c439-4172-a24e-bbca626d168a

However what I really want to focus on here are the differences that are more than technical,that are changes in our writing process and our expectations on how we think and draft.

Last Friday,I was scanning through Tweets from people I follow on Twitter and I found one from Marcia Connor (@marciamarcia) that gave a very brief list of what we expect now when we write. We expect to be -able!

Marcia listed the 5-ables that are now an integral part of our writing proces:

1. Searchable –Whether through search engines or through our files on our computer or through the document we are working on,(using Edit / Find) we expect to be able to search for words or phrases.
2. Editable –Despite initially finding the computer very difficult,I became determined to write on it the first time I watched someone edit out their mistakes without re-copying the whole page. I HATED typing because I was prone to making mistakes,especially in the last 3 or 4 lines in a page. Word processing eliminated the mindless drudgery of re-copying everything that was correct (95%) in order to correct the mistakes (5%). People can also edit online applications like wikis or some blogs with ease and no knowledge of HTML. Being able to edit easily is so freeing!
3. Linkable –Just scroll up and see the link to my screencast on using Styles to automatically generate a Table of Contents. Links are great! I think of them as semi-linear. You bump into something interesting or something confusing and,if there’s a link,you can get more information,or go to a level of richer detail. Like a budge in linearity,you can choose to go deeper,but not off-topic. That’s a link that makes you able to get an explanation or follow your interest. That’s an outgoing link. I will have incoming links when I link this blog post to Twitter and Facebook and some people chose to read it. (That’s how I and many others use Twitter;if they’re interested in the same things I am,I can ‘harvest’links from their Tweets,like I did with Marcia’s Tweet.)
4. Tagable –That’s a new word,and a very important one. When I write a blog post,I add tags to it. That is,I add words that describe it in a way that makes sense to me and (I hope) my readers. For example,my tags for this post are “learning”,“researching”,“web tools”,“writing”,and “Twitter”. If I (or you) want to find this post again in the future,you can look at the Tag Cloud on my right sidebar and click on a word that (we hope) matches a tag I’ve added to it. (You can see the tags for each post at the post’s bottom.) You can also add tags on pictures in sites that let you upload your photos,like Flickr,and you can use tags in social bookmarking sites,like Diigo or Delicious,to find web addresses on different topics. Tags allow you to search,and multiple tags allow you more chances to find the same picture or post by searching from different aspects or points-of-view.

5 . Feedable – Nothing to do with food. More to do with being lazy (or maybe,more accurately,with being smart!) If you find a blog or site that frequently has new and interesting information,you can get its feed and add it to an aggregator like Bloglines or Google Reader so you don’t have to go to the address every time you want to check what’s new on it. Sometimes you don’t even need the RSS Feed,and just the URL will do. Currently,my choice among feed readers is Feedly,which takes a magazine approach. I am able to use feeds to follow my favorite blogs (and comics!)

The five entirely new writing -ables,–searchable,editable,linkable,tagable,feedable,–have become part of how we think,research,draft and write in a way we could not have imagined 20 years ago. How new and different our communication culture and tools are! And how helpful and useful.