Literary Hacker Strikes: Writing With a PC

"Interesting ideas, with some good supporting examples. Overall, however, your analysis is sketchy and repetitive. B-"

The Happy Hacker was not happy, but he brought it on himself. All the Hacker's papers are written on word-processors, literary Cuisinarts which would just as soon make mashed potatoes as they would make julienne french fries. Word processors are to the '80s what drugs were to the '60s--artificial stimulants that can often do more harm than good.

Below, the Happy Hacker hopes to give some advice on how to use electronic stimulants to improve writing. And, how to use them to improve grades (often, the Hacker has more success with the latter than the former).

Better Grades Through Subtitles

It's true. Just by showing a teaching fellow that the writer is conscious of a paper's internal structure, grades can go up. Especially with essays longer than five pages, sub-titles every few paragraphs help to break up the monotony of lengthy text. This in turn shows a grader that thought has gone into the organization of an essay, and it serves as a guide for the grader's reading and evaluation.

Of course, any writer can put in subtitles with a typewriter, but word-processors make the job much easier. Usually, the Hacker recommends centering and using bold print for subtitles. Word-processors also offer an advantage because they allow the writer to change the subtitles easily. Thus, when the Hacker recently has written eight pages of a 10-page paper and then discovered that he had written a different essay than the one assigned, he merely changed the subtitles and re-wrote the introduction and conclusion. Most of the writing remained unchanged. Another advantage of subtitles is that they allow you to avoid transitions.

Writing Poorly: The One-Draft Wonder

Word-processors allow a writer starting from scratch to produce an error-proof final copy without any intermediate print-outs or excessive use of liquid paper. This is one of their biggest drawbacks.

The Hacker once started a simple paper assignment--"Show the effects of concept 1 on events A, B and C through X's theoretical analysis of dialecticism." Unfortunately, by the time the Hacker was writting about C, he was repeating what has been said in A and B. Because he didn't read over the content, and only used the spelling checker to check for mistakes, the result was a neat, clean, poorly-written paper. (Re-read the introduction to find out about the grade received.)

Hacking Up Drafts

The Happy Hacker recommends printing out rough drafts and then making written changes on them. Writing is a process that constantly improves itself. Every time a draft is revised, the overall paper is improved. Simply modifying on the computer screen is not the same as having a printed copy to work with--at least not for a true literary hacker who knows the importance of physically (i.e., with a pen) altering draft after draft. A literary hacker, of course, should be distinguished from a literary hack: a person who happily churns out one-draft wonders.

Retyping: A Creative Necessity

Writers anxious to improve the quality of their prose and arguments should retype major drafts from a print-out. What? Is the Happy Hacker denouncing the key virtue of a word (once-its-there-you-never-have-to-type-it-again) processor? Not really. Rather, the Hacker is suggesting that by occasionally retyping a paper from scratch, the writer is forced to reconsider every word and sentence in a much more active way than simply by dragging a cursor across it.

Usually, if a paper is retyped close to the final draft, it can improve flow and remove awkwardness. This process is especially useful in creative writing (as opposed to argumentative essays). The improved quality obtained by constant revision is probably the reason most novelists still.

Word-processor Add-ons

There are many software add-ons that can improve the power of your word-processor and help clean up your prose. Spelling checkers, programs that proofread your paper for typographical errors, can be very useful, and although the Happy Hacker has no specific recommendations as yet (he's currently reviewing several for an upcoming column), most dictionary programs are better than sitting down with a dictionary.

Other useful attachments are grammatical checkers and outlining programs. Grammatical checkers can discover some incorrect syntax, although they are far from perfect. Outlining programs allow authors to develop outlines for essays and to then modify an essay's structure by experimenting with various alternative outlines (again, look for an upcoming Hacker column on this).

Conclusion

In between getting lousy grades in class and writing this column, the Happy Hacker remains glued to his word-processor trying to figure out how to get a word-processor to write his papers for him, or short of that, how it can at least explain to the professor the reason for turning in an assigned paper after the deadline. When he figures it out, you can hear it here first.