Typewriters: Not What I Expected

I will be the first to admit that I have a very romantic view of typewriters. Since I decided that I wanted to be a writer as a child, I dreamed of writing my novels on a typewriter. It seems kind of like a hipster thing to do now, but I was still excited to use a typewriter for the first time nonetheless. (My dad actually gave me his old one, but I have to go buy ribbons for it, and I haven’t gotten around to that yet.)

Once I sat down, however, I didn’t realize how much effort it would take to type out a long post. After a bit of fighting with Animal (Yes, that was the name of my typewriter. No, I didn’t choose it.), I settled on red ink instead of the virtually nonexistent black and started typing. Within the first line or two, I was already making typos and felt frustrated that I couldn’t do anything to fix them. The perfectionist in me wanted to get a new blank piece of paper and start over, but I knew that if I kept doing that, I would use all of the paper on the table.

What really irritated me was the fact that I couldn’t place my fingers on the keys, like I would with a normal keyboard. I’m a fairly fast typer on a computer, and that’s the speed that I’m used to typing. But with the typewriter, I had to slow down and hit one key at a time to limit my mistakes and to make sure that the key was hit hard enough to print the letter on the page.

This isn’t to say that I’m no longer fond of typewriters. I actually still have a romantic view of them and associate them with some of my favorite writers from the past. However, I would definitely think twice before attempting to write a novel on one. That dream is going to have to wait until I somehow get more patience or someone finds a way to allow you to backspace on a typewriter.

My typewriter was named Animal. The typewriters in the room were each named after a different member of the Muppet band.

Using the Pages app

As I am one of the few humans left who do not own a smartphone, I experimented with the iPad app Pages.  It works similarly to programs like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, as it has changeable page margins and options for text alignment, size, and more (as seen below.)

One feature that I found interesting is the sharing option.  This seems to be a smart idea, as it lets you type up anything from creative writing to academic writing and everything in between and easily share it with other people through the internet. The “Send a Copy” button was useful to me for writing my last blog post, because it let me e-mail a copy of the post to myself, which I then was able to quickly copy and paste into a WordPress post and publish.

The main constraint of this writing space is something I discovered fairly easily: just how tedious it is to type a bunch of text. The iPad keyboard comes up for you to type with once Pages is opened, but the built in keyboard isn’t the easiest to type with. It’s fairly tempermental, unless you are extremely careful with which buttons you push. The keyboard also brought about another issue: I wasn’t exactly sure how to angle the iPad itself to type. I tried laying it out on the table in front of me, but that created a lot of strain on my neck from facing down to watch what I was typing.  I then tried putting it upright and typing, but it either kept sliding down or made my wrists hurt from having them at a virtual right angle.

 

 

The inability to type comfortably led to me digging out the wireless keyboard to use with the iPad. That definitely fixed the typing/keyboard issue, but I know that not everyone has access to an iPad wireless keyboard. (Yes, I suppose it does count as cheating for using a keyboard for a post that I was supposed to write with either a smartphone or tablet of some kind, but it was necessary.)

 

Once I had the wireless keyboard, I was in business. My only problem with the program disappeared and I was easily able to use the writing space. I would recommend the Pages app to anyone with an iPad AND a wireless keyboard. However, the keyboard isn’t necessary if you aren’t doing much writing. It’s just useful for longer documents.

My Ideal Writing Space

My favorite writing space this semester was actually WordPress itself. If I had to create my own ideal writing space it would probably look a lot like that. It would have a word counter on the bottom of the screen that counts as you go, just like it does on WordPress. It would be white and black font, although I would have a tool bar available to change the font color, text, and size. It would not have any sounds, I do not see why that would be useful. The work itself would save every 30 seconds, that way if something happens to the computer it will all be saved. Accessing your posts would be very simple. You would have a folder saved with the posts newest to oldest and you could just click on the one you want whether it is to edit or just view it.

I would like all multimedia to be able to be posted right on in the writing space. I would also like there to be a spot for connections to all social media sites to share the blog posts. It would be good to have a live blogging type of feature also on the writing space.

I want it to be easy to change the theme of the posts. Although black and white is ideal for me when writing it, I would like it to be easy to change the background and texts before submitting it. That way if someone wants each post to have a different background, maybe one that goes with the topic each time, it is easy to do and has a lot of free choices.

I really just want it to be a clean and simple looking format. I want young kids and retired adults to all be able to look at the space and understand quickly how to use it so that they can share what they want with the world. I would like an easy way for readers to follow, like and comment on the posts.

Using the Creative Writer app on my smartphone

For this assignment I had to choose a writing app on either a smartphone or tablet to work with. Since I have my iPhone with me all the time it was easiest to use that. I chose the Creative Writer app that I already had installed on the phone yet never used. This app is meant to be a no typing writing app, using a word suggestion keyboard. If you don’t want to type out each word you can start the typing and use the keyboard to choose the next work you would like to use. I found that I would still type each word out as if I were in a document on the computer. I am sure that if I use this software more I will get used to the idea of choosing a word rather than typing it out.

You can change the word suggestion keyboard to any color you want, I had mine set on pink which was a nice pop of color on the black and white page. It reminded me of Zenpen in this way, with the white page, black text and minimal clutter. I like how it looks like a Microsoft Word document unlike the notebook app that comes pre-installed in the phone. It is easy to type in and read, and it made me feel like it was more of a work space rather than a note space. Since the social media apps and websites I was looking at were also on my phone it was easy to switch back and forth. Gathering the information from one app and putting it into the Creative Writer app was fast. If I wanted to answer a text, or get onto a website to check my research I could do it all on the same device as I was working on. The app has a save button on the top which is easy to find.

I do not usually use my smartphone for writing assignments since it is small and I like to have a big writing space. I downloaded this app a year or more ago but never had any reason to use it until now. I am glad we were assigned to use a smartphone or tablet app because this is definitely one that I will use in the future. Whether it is for personal or academic use, it is a great app to have on my phone. I will be using this app more now that I see how it works.

GoogleDocs: Microsoft Word 2.0

As a frequent user of GoogleDocs, I was glad to see that it was one of the writing platforms we would be exploring for class. In terms of appearance, it closely resembles Microsoft Word, which is what I’ve used for years to write everything from poetry to essays.  It’s a familiar space, and I think it was designed that way on purpose. Just like Microsoft Word, it’s very easy to type whatever you’d like and edit its appearance.

My apologies for this poorly made gif. (Pronounced “jif”, not “gif”.)

GoogleDocs provides you with a place to save your documents online where you can edit them later.  This is an incredibly important feature to me, as my laptop recently had a meltdown and I lost a lot of files that hadn’t been backed up. Once you initially start typing in the document, GoogleDocs saves the draft to your account and automatically continues to save as you type in the provided space. This allows for a more convenient way to write and edit text, as you can open GoogleDocs on any computer and continue where you left off.

It offers the same options as a regular word processor, in terms of changing the appearance of text. However, it also includes the option to insert anything from online media, such as pictures or links to traditional academic writing items, such as headers, footers, and page numbers. I personally really liked how it incorporated two seemingly separate writing worlds (online and offline). It made me feel like the designers of the program really understand what’s important to writing space users.

The most important feature of GoogleDocs is the ability to download, e-mail, or publish your document. If you were working on an assignment on multiple computers, you will be able to download it to your main computer to keep for a possible portfolio down the line. The ability to e-mail your document from the writing space itself is something that I haven’t personally seen before. Usually, you have to save it as a document file and then send it as an attachment to an e-mail. I’m not entirely sure how it works through GoogleDocs, but because it’s attached to a Google e-mail account, I assume that it expedites the process of getting the document to the intended recipient.

ZenPen: Catchy Name, But is it a Good Writing Space?

I composed my first research-related post using the distraction-free site ZenPen.

The first thing I noticed was the blankness of the page, as well as the simple black and white color scheme. It struck me as very boring. This makes for little distraction for the writing process, but for me, I prefer my writing spaces to be a bit more exciting. I like having options, in terms of text and the ability to post media.

While writing my last research post, I found myself marking where I would put images, links, and Twitter handles, because ZenPen doesn’t give you those kinds of options. It focuses on the text itself.

Having to mark where I would include outside media was tedious, to say the least. After copying and pasting the text I had written in ZenPen into WordPress, I didn’t even type out the full names of the owners of the Twitter accounts; I referred to them by their Twitter handles only. It was irritating to have to go back to add multiple links and pictures after writing my text and was a big strike against ZenPen in my book.

In spite of this, there were a few features unique to ZenPen that I enjoyed experimenting with. On the left side of the page, you are given a few options, including fullscreen and to save your text. The other two features are what intrigued me most. The first one is the word count. If you click the target button, it allows you to insert a number as the word count you are aiming for while writing. This seems like a very useful tool for writing essays that have a word count.

The other feature that I thought was unique was the invert colors option. Instead of working with a white background and black text, it gives you a black background with white text. I’m not sure what kind of purpose this has, in terms of the writing space itself, but I still thought it was an interesting choice for one of the very few options available on ZenPen.

Overall, I found ZenPen to be an adequate writing space. It personally isn’t my cup of tea, but I can understand why other writers enjoy its simplicity.