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The lack of spell-check was pretty great in helping to focus in on writing. I will try turning that off when I write in the future, returning to the old way of running spell-check after I have gotten the thoughts down on the page. Five minutes essay below... also, first post (hello!) to Hacker News. This is a test of the most dangerous writing app in the world. I am typing in whatever comes to mind in a stream of consciousness, but with proper capitalization, punctuation, and grammar. I could never tolerate a stream of consciousness essay on a standardized test, such as the ACT. For example, when I was a junior in high school, I encountered one of these beasts which I found nearly impenetrable to digest, followed by thirty-odd questions asking for my detailed interpretation of the steaming pile, which I am sure was never written to be used to abuse young adults just trying to set up the next step in their academic career. I can imagine some panel of experts somewhere picking out this shining example of obtuseness as the essay for the test, cackling to themselves about how useless this is either predicting future success, or as a test of any specific (useful) skill. On the other hand, maybe we all have that one colleague at work who writes email in stream of consciousness mode. Who knows, if I didn't face-plant on that ACT back in the day, maybe I would never have brushed up on unlearning English. Such is life, we will never know. I do know however that I paid for that test, and I paid for the next test after that thanks to that essay. Ok, now this brings us to the present day. Here I am, writing in to a random screen buffer on the Internet, which promises to delete my text if I do not continue generating words for five minutes straight. It is especially evil in that A) there is no timer and I didn't think to check the clock; B) I do not know where or if this will be posted somewhere; and C) this is yet another useless life skill. Or is it... maybe the next time I am bumping up against a proposal submission deadline, I will think back in fondness to this experience on the most dangerous writing app. |
I write everything in vim and then copy it over/generate it/whatever afterwards. I can't stand all the different spelling corrections, auto-completes, and everything else getting in the way. It's so totally distracting.