Goodbye MS Word, You Lousy Whore

Because I spend 75% of my time on the computer writing, for years I’ve allowed myself to get suckered into purchasing (yes, actually buying—I refuse to pirate software) the latest version of Microsoft Office. Now that Office 2008 for the Mac is out, I briefly considered picking it up. Very briefly.

In a previous entry I described the three writing programs I use most often: WriteRoom, Pages (part of Apple’s iWork suite), and Final Draft. Conspicuously absent from that list is MS Word.

Office 2008 for the Mac. I’m
running out to get it now—NOT!

Unless the fellows in Redmond, Washington get their heads out of their asses and figure out what people who actually write want in a program, Office 2004 for the Mac will be my last Microsoft purchase.

I’m tired of their shipping faulty software and letting “early adopters” (never me—I know better) find the glitches and essentially fix it for them. I’m tired of “productivity software” that is anything but productive and in fact ends up wasting your time as you jerk around with it, trying to get it to behave the way you need it to. And I’m tired of programs like Word that are written for the lowest common denominator—for people who don’t know the difference between a gerund and an ampersand.

So, listen up, Microsoft. In case no one’s told you before (like they haven’t), here are the features writers of book-length work want in a program. In some cases, Word has these features, or similar ones, but they’re so deeply buried in the program, or presented via a clunky, obtuse interface, that they’re useless. Here’s my list:

THE LIST

1. Make a special version of Word specific to writers of book-length work and/or scripts.

2. In this version, have the ability to shut off ALL auto-anything. No auto-correction, auto-character substitution, or auto-”I see you’re working on…” dialog boxes.

3. Get rid of all “Wizards” or template choosers. Allow the user to designate the type of document he’s writing based on a function key selection at the outset of the program (e.g., F8=Novel, F9=Script, F10=Nonfiction book, F11=Doctoral Thesis or Academic/Scientific paper—both require massive footnotes).

4. Built-in support of the three major citation and style systems: APA, MLA and Chicago. These should be selectable in Preferences.

5. A side-window, like with Adobe Acrobat, in which you can instantly search for any word (a character name, a place, a verb, anything) and get a list of ALL its occurrences in the text, the pages it appears on, and the contexts.

6. Recognition of fictional dialogue attribution conventions, so the program isn’t falsely declaring there’s something wrong with the sentence. “Please listen, Microsoft,” he said.

7. One-click tagging and formatting that MAKES SENSE. For example, I make one click and tag a line as a Chapter heading. In Setup or Preferences, I create a stylesheet, much like you do with CSS, in which Chapter headings, book titles, word counts, page headers, etc. are designated ahead of time. Then, if I want to make changes, I make them in ONE place and have the changes CASCADE (CSS, get it?) through the entire book or script.

8. Pre-programmed formatting conventions for each type of work mentioned here.

9. Built-in multiple dictionaries and thesauri: American Heritage & Oxford American English; Rogets & The Synonym Finder.

10. A usage finder built-in: Fowler’s and/or The Careful Writer.

11. An editing and polishing “engine”. This is my big idea. I’m not talking about simple spell-check or stupid “grammar check” here. These are the features of my fantasy editing & polishing program:

a) First, it should operate the way real writers work when they write, which is to focus on one, or a couple, of items each time through the manuscript. The writer should be able to select from a variety of choices for editing: adverbs, adjectives, dash usage, that/which hunting, past progressive (e.g., was running) usage, etc.

b) The writer should be able to get counts of any and all of these items. Book-length work is all about these counts: word count, how many adjectives or adverbs the writer uses, how many times/frequency the writer uses other forms of punctuation, etc. Sometimes seeing the sheer number of times you do something makes you reconsider it.

c) What I call “repetition alerts”—using the same word more than twice in a row or beyond a designated limit in a chapter or page; repeating sentence structures; beginning two sentences the same way; opening two chapters the same way; etc.

d) A polishing component done in split-screen: on the left, your original document sentence or paragraph; on the right, the modified version.

e) The ability to highlight text on both split-screens and have the computer read it back to you aloud; often you don’t notice good or bad writing until you HEAR it. (By the way, kudos to Microsoft for the Speech playback function in Word 2004 for the Mac. This was a step in the right direction.)

I could go on and on, but why bother? I doubt Microsoft is listening. However, maybe you work for one of the other writing software companies—Nisus, Scrivener or OpenOffice—and you’d like to take these suggestions. Fine, but if you do, please make sure you take my editing/polishing “engine” idea because that’s the one I’d really like to use.

Thank you for reading this rant.