Dan Frakes last night on Twitter linked to J. Eddie Smith, IV’s Think of Microsoft Word as the internet. Smith argues:

Word is not a writing application. It’s a desktop publishing application. When I start a writing project of any size in Word, it feels like I’m starting to build a house by first worrying about wall colors.

I’m not sure I’d go that far. If Word is a DTP app, it’s a pretty bad one. But I do agree that there’s a tendency with any ‘advanced’ office-style app to worry about presentation and formatting too much while writing. There’s also the issue of lock-in. It’s unlikely Office is going anywhere, but then I once thought the same of other applications I used for writing, such as ClarisWorks. Those old files I wrote years ago are now hidden from view, underneath layers of incompatibility. When DOCX first appeared as a format in a recent version of Word, but first on Windows and not on the Mac, I made a decision to switch to RTF or  TXT, depending on the project. I’d already realised by that point that I disliked Word (bloated, crashy, too much junk on screen) and had been looking for and testing alternatives for a while.

Today, I primarily use two applications for writing:

Scrivener is used for large projects (such as magazine cover features) and also ongoing ones where I have a collection of smaller files, such as the daily news I write for .net’s website. Its container is proprietary but you can easily enough access the package and yoink individual RTFs if you need to.

For shorter pieces, I favour WriteRoom, an efficient, simple full-screen editor. These have become all the rage of late, and the Mac App Store has at least a half-dozen competent alternatives, most of which are cheaper than WriteRoom. But WriteRoom offers, for me, the best balance of usability and customisation. iA Writer’s also pretty good, but its not working with OS X window managers limits its usefulness for me. I also hear good things about Byword, although I’ve not used it myself, and one of my editors swears by Nisus, although that to me feels a little too much like returning to a Word-type app. (This is, of course, in part down to how you set up Nisus, which is a powerful, usable app, but I nonetheless prefer the stark ‘words, count and nothing else’ default WriteRoom set-up.)

As Smith says:

When it comes to writing, I think of Word as the internet. It’s a destination, not a vehicle.

[…]

Words aren’t worthy of cosmetics until they say something. More importantly, each second you spend fiddling with the aesthetics of your document is a second spent not writing. Accumulated over just a few days, that can be a tremendous number of seconds.

I admit I spent some time faffing about with Scrivener and WriteRoom’s aesthetics, to get the defaults the way I wanted them. But after that point, I’ve not touched them, and so I spend my time writing and not worrying about anything else. Because of the efficiency and clarity of the apps, I also concentrate more on the words than anything else, whereas Word was always for me a source of distraction.

Your mileage might vary, of course, but if you enjoy writing or do it as a job, I’d strongly recommend you at least check out alternatives if you’re still using Word. Perhaps you’ll find you prefer Microsoft’s app after all, in which case you’ll at least know you’ve made the right choice for you. But you might also discover better, faster ways of working on words, which don’t involve Word.