Writing tool for MacOs, or for Windows-a question.

Posted by jamesofford
Aug 1, 2010 at 03:38 PM

After many years of just thinking nervously about it, I have decided to try my hand at doing some writing. I mean, more than just posting to boards like this and writing emails and memos at work.

Years ago, a boss of mine commented that I would never improve my writing until I got good at using the computer for writing. He was a scientist, and when he meant good at writing, he meant good at writing papers for publication in journals. For that he used Microsoft Word. When I am writing these days, I continue to start the process by doing it longhand. I find that writing things out with a pen allows me to get my thoughts out with the least amount of foofraw getting in the way. I then use this first draft as the starting point for my computer draft. For many things, I will continue to do things with a pen, but I am beginning to agree with my former boss that if I want to do some serious laying down of words I need to do it on a computer. Plus, I need to have the ability to rewrite easily.

I have about 4 papers to write at work. These will be submitted for publication. I am going to begin using some of my free time to do some outside of work writing. The goal of this is publication as well, but a different type of publication. Not in scientific journals. Either on the web, or through some other venue, I haven’t figured that out yet.

Now to the question-I am looking for something that doesn’t have all of the gewgaws that something like Word does, but I am looking for something that is more capable than something like texedit on the Mac or Notepad on Windows. Stuff like spellcheckers, some rudimentary formatting, and a few other tools would be nice. Since this is the Outlinersoftware forum, then integrated outlining would be nice. Also the ability to generate a file with a clean format.

Right now, my home computer(the one this is being written on) is a MacBook. I use a PC at work running Windows XP. I am thinking of buying another PC to use just as a writing machine. My company has a program that allows us to buy machines that have been replaced for pretty cheap. That one won’t have all of the stuff that I have on my other computers that can distract me from just writing.

Any suggestions?

Not asking for much am I?

Jim.