Writing with a Word Processor

William Zinsser

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062244826
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

In this helpful and entertaining book the author of the classic On Writing Well explains that he has always had a love of paper and a fear of mechanical objects. He describes how he confronted his hang-ups, got a word processor, taught himself to use it and gradually overcame his sense of inferiority to the machine. He explains how the word processor—by enabling him to revise his work instantly on a screen—has changed his lifelong methods of writing, rewriting and editing.

But William Zinsser's book isn't only for writers. It's for all the people who have to do any kind of writing—memos, letters, reports, directives—as part of their working day. It explains how the word processor will save time and money in an office or a corporation and predicts that it will soon be our primary writing tool.

On one level Writing with a Word Processor is a manual for beginners that describes clearly and simply how to use the new technology. But it is also one writer's story. William Zinsser takes the reader along on a highly personal journey, writing with warmth and humor about his anxieties and fears, his setbacks and triumphs. His book is both an informal guide and an encouraging companion.

1. Personal Baggage

I first realized that the act of writing was about to enter a new era five years ago when I went to see an editor at The New York Times. As I was ushered through the vast city room I felt that I had strayed into the wrong office. The place was clean and carpeted and quiet. As I passed long rows of desks I saw that almost every desk had its own computer terminal and its own solemn occupant — a man or a woman typing at the computer keyboard or reading what was on the terminal screen. I saw no typewriters, no paper, no mess. It was a cool and sterile environment; the drones at their machines could have been processing insurance claims or tracking a spacecraft in orbit. What they didn’t look like were newspaper people, and what the place didn’t look like was a newspaper office.

I knew how a newspaper office should look and sound and smell — I worked in one for thirteen years. The paper was the New York Herald Tribune, and its city room, wide as a city block, was dirty and disheveled. Reporters wrote on ancient typewriters that filled the air with clatter; copy editors labored on coffee-stained desks over what the reporters had written. Crumpled balls of paper littered the floor and filled the wastebaskets — failed efforts to write a good lead or a decent sentence. The walls were grimy — every few years they were painted over in a less restful shade of eye-rest green — and the atmosphere was hazy with the smoke of cigarettes and cigars. At the very center the city editor, a giant named L. L. Engelking, bellowed his displeasure with the day’s work, his voice a rumbling volcano in our lives. I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world.

I had always wanted to be a newspaperman, and the Herald Tribune was the newspaper I wanted to be a man on. As a boy I had been reared on the “Trib,” and its Bodoni Bold headlines and beautiful makeup fixed themselves early in my mind as exactly how a newspaper should present itself to the world. The same mixture of craftsmanship and warmth ran through the writing. A Herald Tribune story always had some extra dimension of humor or humanity, or surprise, or graceful execution, that didn’t turn up in other papers. The people who put this paper together obviously worked with care and loved the work. My dream was to be one of them.

As a teenager I wrote for the school newspaper and learned to set type at the local shop where the paper was printed. The afternoons I spent there were some of the happiest of my boyhood. I loved the smell of the ink and the clacking of the linotype machines. I liked being part of a physical process that took what I wrote and converted it into type and locked it in a frame and put it on a press and printed it for anybody to read. One Christmas I asked my parents for a printing press — a wish that they must have regretted granting, for it was installed in the attic, directly over their room, and the house shook at night with irregular thumps as I fed paper into the press and pulled its huge handle down. I bought books on type and studied the different typefaces, learning how type cutters and printers over the centuries had shaped the letters to achieve legibility and a certain emotional weight.

At college I was editor of a campus magazine, and I hung around the university press where it was composed and printed. I was hooked on a tradition. Even when I left college during World War II to enlist in the army I didn’t escape the process of getting the day’s events validated on paper. Colonel McCloskey, finding a captive writer (and a mere sergeant) in his midst, took no chance that his feats of command might go unrecorded. He commanded me to write the company history, and, sitting in a wintry tent in Italy with an old typewriter and a lot of paper, I did.

After the war when I went looking for a job I inevitably went looking at the Herald Tribune, and when I heard George Cornish, the managing editor, offering to hire me as a beginning reporter at forty-five dollars a week I considered myself as rich as Rockefeller. Well, almost. The paper in those first postwar years was a constellation of journalists at the top of their form. I still remember the routine excellence of the local reporters and foreign correspondents and the elegance of the critics and columnists: Virgil Thomson, Red Smith, Walter Lippmann and many others. It was a paper whose editors coveted good writing. Not only did they publish the best writers; they cultivated good writing in younger members of the staff by showing that they cared. Those older men who made us rewrite what we had written — and rewritten — weren’t doing it only for our own good but for the honorableness of the craft. They were custodians of a trust.

Surrounded by veteran reporters, I studied their habits and was struck by their fierce pride. The Herald Tribune always had less money and a smaller staff than its august competitor, The New York Times. Nevertheless it was an article of faith that one Trib reporter could cover a story as well as the three Times reporters assigned to the same beat. Nobody exemplified this idea more than Peter Kihss, who was covering the newly established United Nations in New York. He wasn’t just a member of the Trib’s United Nations bureau; he was the bureau, and every afternoon he came back staggering under heavy reports issued by the UN’s burgeoning agencies and committees. He then sat down at his ancient typewriter, which he pounded with demonic speed, and wrote two or three articles that put into coherent form everything important that the UN had done that day. He was a man possessed by facts.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, those years were the end of an era for the Herald Tribune. High costs and various other factors began to erode the paper’s quality, and over the next decade the stars gradually left and went elsewhere, correctly sensing that the Trib’s sickness of body and soul would be terminal. Some reporters went over to The New York Times, including Peter Kihss, whose by-line continued to be a warranty of truth doggedly pursued.

When my own turn came to leave the Herald Tribune — I resigned to become a free-lance writer — I also took plenty of baggage along from my apprenticeship with editors and printers whose standards were high. I found that I was never quite satisfied with what I had written; I had a compulsion to rewrite, to polish, to cut, to start over. This meant that I not only did a lot of rewriting; I also did a lot of retyping. At the end of the day my wastebasket was full and my back and shoulders were stiff.

My family quite properly urged me to get an electric typewriter, and I tried one out. It drove me crazy. My touch was far too heavy from all the years of pummeling an Underwood; the electric typewriter, designed for gentler hands, kept putting spaces within the words as well as between the words. M y se nt e nces lo oke d some ething lik e th is, and I spent more time erasing — and swearing — than writing. I also didn’t like the typewriter’s steady hum; I hate unwanted noise, and I didn’t want it as part of the writing process. The job is hard enough in silence.

But during the 1970s I began to realize that everything I knew about printing — the process of getting words on paper — was becoming obsolete. Gutenberg was through. His invention of movable type had changed the world and lasted five hundred years. Now nobody wanted Gutenberg’s “hot type.” The new thing was “cold type” — type that didn’t exist as type at all, but only as an image on film. Magazine writers continued to write on a typewriter, but the person who “set” their articles no longer sat at a linotype machine. He sat at a keyboard that put the words on tape, and the tape somehow got converted into film. The proofs that came back from the printer no longer had the bite of type into paper; they looked like what they were — photographs of type. Something had been lost: the clean edge of letters, the age-old flavor of craft.

But a great deal had also been gained. With actual type eliminated, a whole series of cumbersome and expensive steps was bypassed: setting the type, arranging it in flat pages, and making curved plates from those pages that could be fastened onto high-speed rotary presses. Just compose the type on film — call it “photocomposition” — and fasten the film to the presses. Eureka!

Still, I assumed that writers couldn’t be plugged into this system. Writers were human — they couldn’t be wired like machines. (This is not to say that some writers aren’t very peculiarly wired.) And yet — portents were in the air. A few friends who worked for newspapers told me that their papers were “converting to terminals.” What could that mean? It seemed to mean that writers could be plugged into the system after all. If typesetting could be done on film (saving the time and cost of setting real type), writing could be done on film (saving the time and cost of having someone retype on film what the reporter had written on paper). Just take the reporter’s paper away and sit him down in front of a new kind of computer. Call it a word processor. Process that reporter’s words right out of his brain and into an electronic circuit. Eureka again.

This was the new stage that journalism had reached when I went to see the New York Times editor in 1978. The paper had just completed a radical conversion of its plant: the editorial rooms had been torn apart to accommodate sophisticated new wiring and equipment. I had heard talk of the chaos that accompanied the change, but I hadn’t really pictured what the new city room would look like. Maybe I didn’t want to know. Now I knew. As I walked between the long rows of reporters at their silent terminals my journalistic past evaporated.

I asked the Times editor how the reporters were adjusting to the new procedure. He said that of course they all hated it at first, especially the older ones. They kicked and screamed and said they could never write on these terminals. But after a few weeks they began to feel comfortable, and now most of them said they never wanted to go back to a typewriter. He said the reporters really liked being able to instantly revise what they wrote, deleting or inserting or moving words and phrases and whole sentences and seeing their work always neat and tidy on the screen. He pointed out that not only were the writers doing their writing on the screen; that was also where the editors were editing all the copy. They summoned the reporters’ articles on their screens, making their own changes, as editors will.

I wondered how this would affect the subtle relationship between writers and editors. I thought of all the times when a Herald Tribune editor brought over a piece of my copy to discuss changes he had made or wanted to make, and of all the times when I — as an editor or a teacher — had gone over my changes with a young writer or a student. To be apprenticed to a good editor is the best way to learn how to write. What would happen when all the editing was done on film by successive editors? Who would know who had done what? Who would remember what the original copy said? And who would be accountable for what had been changed? Nobody’s handwriting — or fingerprints — would survive to tell the tale.

These were questions that I would want to know more about. But for the present I had seen enough of the future, and I started to leave. As I was walking back out of the city room my eye was caught by an unusual sight. In the middle of a row of desks with reporters working at terminals I saw one reporter writing on an old standard typewriter. He was a gray-haired man, obviously near retirement. Just as obviously he had rebelled against learning the new technology and had been granted special dispensation to stick with the venerable tools of his trade. I looked at him with sympathy and with a certain admiration: the last puritan, true to his values. The more I looked, the more familiar he seemed. There was something about the intensity with which he peered through his thick metal-framed glasses at what he was writing, something about the ferocious energy with which he attacked the typewriter keys. I had seen this reporter before.

Then I realized where I had seen him. It was Peter Kihss.

2. Entering the Future

The sight of Pete Kihss lingered with me. I identified with him more than I cared to admit. Just because America’s newspapers were forcing their reporters and editors into electronic bondage for production reasons of their own, I as an individual writer didn’t have to join the stampede. What set writers apart as individuals was their individuality. I had been getting along fine with my old Underwood, and I wasn’t about to change.

But the notion of writers at their word processors started to tug at my consciousness. When I watched Lou Grant on television I no longer thought it was odd to see reporters writing at a terminal. And I began to see word processors in magazine layouts and Sunday newspaper sections devoted to home decoration. Designers were tastefully accommodating them in the study, where, only yesterday, nothing vulgar had been allowed to intrude on the quiet elegance of the antique desk, the leather-bound dictionary and the glass paperweight holding down the day’s genteel mail.

I also began to hear about real authors writing real books on their own word processors. Jimmy Carter went home to Plains to write his memoirs on a word processor: the first President to go electronic. (If Lincoln had had one for the Gettysburg Address he probably would have deleted “Four score and seven years ago” and made it “87.” Thank God he wrote the sonorous phrase by hand and didn’t want to erase it.) Suddenly all the magazines were running cover stories about “the computer in your life.” In only a few years, we were told, everybody in America would be sitting at the keyboard paying bills, instructing his bank and his broker, heating his home and pool, calculating his calories, playing the horses and presumably programming a satisfying sex life.

Meanwhile the word processor had invaded the American office, welcomed as a miraculous savior by every executive whose business required the same clusters of words to be neatly typed again and again. Law firms, for instance, with their long and lugubrious paragraphs of “boilerplate,” could simply store these standardized blocks in the memory of the machine and call them up and insert them wherever they were needed. Architects started using the word processor for specifications, and doctors for medical reports.

It was also a Godsend for all the businesses that depend on correspondence with their customers — mail-order houses, for example, that receive a daily flood of special orders, queries and complaints. Now they could store all the paragraphs that answer all the routine queries (the item is out of stock, there will be a delay of several weeks, the product has been discontinued, we regret the inconvenience), plus the gracious opening and closing paragraphs that thank the customer for writing and for being such a faithful friend.

Clearly the day was not far off when vast numbers of Americans would be writing on word processors — not just “writers,” but all the people who had to do any writing to transact the ordinary business of the day. This would be especially true as the nation’s secretarial pool continued to dry up. Five years ago it was common for two middle managers to share a secretary; today the ratio is as high as fifteen to one. Good managers can no longer afford to wait for an available secretary to type a memo; they will write their memos on a word processor and transmit them instantly to the company’s out-of-town offices, where other managers will read them on a terminal and answer them. Writing on a word processor, in short, would soon become second nature.

All this I began to know objectively. But subjectively it still didn’t touch me. Word processors were what happened to somebody else.

Then, one day, my wife said, “You ought to write a book about how to write with a word processor.”

“Who?” I said. “Me?”

3. A Shopping Trip

The next day I bit the bullet and went around to IBM. Actually it was two weeks later. I’m not good at biting bullets — I tend to put off tasks like going to the dentist and to IBM.

I chose IBM solely on the basis of its reputation as an old and respected leader in its field. I knew that many companies were now making word processors. But I didn’t want to waste time comparing their products because I had no basis of comparison. I proceeded on the assumption that all word processors were fundamentally alike. Some of their functions would differ in minor ways, and so would their keyboards and much of their terminology. I could only describe how my machine worked and leave it to readers to adapt my experience to their own. I would rent or buy my equipment from IBM as an individual customer, not as a writer making a business arrangement. There would be no discounts or special favors; nobody would owe anybody anything. My book would imply no endorsement of IBM over any other company’s equipment.

All these practical and ethical details were clear to me as I went to an IBM showroom to meet the product face to face. But nothing else was clear. My head was clogged with anxiety and resistance. I really did feel as if I were going to the dentist. I was forcing myself to keep the appointment.

The people at IBM looked spruce. The sales manager, whose name was Robert, was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt and a conservative tie. His assistant, Donna, was wearing the woman’s equivalent — she looked like a successful young ba...