#web #writing #tools-for-thought #desktop-publishing #knowledge-work #cohost-repost #thinking-about
2023-08-06

thinking about how the boom in knowledge-sharing wasn't desktop publishing, but making it so that editing what you wrote wasn't a write, then edit, then write.

you can move things around experimentally, you can see how things sound and remove them easily, you can more easily go for clarity in-the-moment when you realize using + instead of "and" will disambiguate with the other "and".

you could do that with painstaking exacto-knife and glue, but computers and especially HTML really changed it. Typewriters still had the same problem as writing -- you could do minor edits, but not to the structure of the piece in flight.

and so much of my thinking and insight comes from the act of moving things around to clarify to a (fictitious or not) reader. like using an IDE for thinking. Someone wrote a blog on this, maybe Andy Matuschak?

related reading: the internet is just words on a page, and you're reading them - Justin Jackson