A Dumb Trick I Use to Improve My Writing · 03/17/2008 08:41 PMI’m always looking for ways to reduce the pain of writing. Don’t misunderstand me: I enjoy writing, but often there are obstacles to getting down to writing. One of these problems is simply that the tools get in the way. What’s worse is that a lot of the time, I’m stuck with whatever tools are available to me at the office or the computer lab, so I’m particularly enamored with the idea of using existing tools in new and different ways. Most frequently, that tool is Microsoft Word. I like Microsoft Word, but in many ways it’s a victim of its own success. Since this tool is forced to be all things to all people, it makes a poor working environment for me. Whenever I start a new Word document, I get tangled up in formatting, page layout, and all the other fun tools of Word. It’s fun, but immensely wasteful of my time. During a recent Future Technical Communicators workshop, I had a bit of an epiphany about how I should be using Word. The workshop was an introduction to styles and formatting in Word and during the course of the workshop, the presenter showed how the styles are reflected in the outline view in Microsoft Word. Immediately, I realized that the outline view isn’t just a tool for navigating large documents (even though it is that, too), but that it could also be the primary view for editing text. The Trick To implement my fast track to Word productivity, do the following steps:
Why It Works If you do this immediately after opening a new Word document, you can skip formatting entirely. Bypassing the formatting and the toolbars lets you work with the document at a strictly semantic level. It’s a simple trick, but one that works. Once you’re done with your document, it’s a simple process to switch back to a print view and sort out the formatting. The secondary benefit of this approach is that the outline of the document is no longer implicit. You can’t work on the document without, at very least, deliberately ignoring the structure of the document. If you’re lucky, you will adapt and develop an outline of the document as you go. Or if you’re really lucky, you will write an outline first and fill out the body text second. In any case, working in the outline view can’t hurt and has the potential to liberate you from Word’s distracting forces. 
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I usually have the problem of not wanting to write whatever I’m writing in the first place.
— The Girl 03/17/2008 09:10 PM #