My poor, almost four-year-old laptop is on the brink of collapse. She moans and churns and thinks really hard about loading webpages now. Awakening her from digital slumber takes a few pushes and prods at her buttons. It’s not her fault; this is exactly what’s supposed to happen.
So, I’ve started the overwhelming task of researching new laptops, tempted by the possibilities of sleek and fast Chromebooks in particular. 90% of the work I do on my computer is online anyway, and rarely do I use any of the clunky software I impulsively buy for various “productive” uses that quickly fall by the wayside. I’ve thought about switching to a Mac too, but I can’t bring myself to invest in a product that requires consumers to buy individual and unique cords for basically every function (I take pride in being able to plug overhead projectors directly into my computer without having to use the limp-necked, insultingly-named “dongle”).
Yet there’s one Microsoft tool that I just can’t quit: Microsoft Word commenting and Track Changes. OK, OK, I know that Track Changes is prescriptive and ugly and red, but when it comes to my own writing especially, I love that I can see the changes I make dynamically, visibly, and quickly.
I’ve become especially fond of commenting on my own writing as I’m writing. Comments are what I use when I have something more I want to say about a particular idea, but am not yet sure how to incorporate it into the prose. My comments include everything from venting about how clunky my phrasing is to wondering whether a particular idea makes sense to expanding upon my prose more with ideas that I know must fit somewhere, but I’m not quite sure where.
I’ve even found myself writing things in comments like, “Well, what I really want to say is more about… but I’m not sure it’s relevant to put this thought here…” In other words, comments free me from my desire to have every thought of my writing placed in a linear and particular order. For better or for worse, I often feel obligated to constrict my writing in particular ways, to only write things in the order that I know I’ll finally want them. That’s totally silly, of course; I should know as a writing instructor that the space of a page, the space of a word processing document never ever has to be written in a “final” order and, in fact, words and paragraphs should be moved around. A lot! But there’s a part of my personality that resists a desire to move things (at least until I have every idea down). It’s not a convenient impulse.
So, what do I do instead? I write myself comments. I often wind up moving the comments too and they feel wonderfully liberating. They allow me to see just how messy and insane my writing is. And that’s a good thing.
Every day, writing is hard and I work to psyche myself out and convince myself that it’s not. One way that I’m making sure it feels less hard is by allowing myself to comment and comment freely. I don’t think I’ll wind up buying a Chromebook – I’m still exploring my options – because I think that using a Word interface comforts me, gives me infrastructure, and perhaps most importantly, allows me the freedom to see my messy thoughts and mistakes. Believe me, I’m still working away from Microsoft applications for other purposes (See “Citation Woes”), but for initial drafting at least, the comforts of my good ol’ software applications still give me the space I need for the most important thing: my ideas.