Sam Lewis wrote:
Of course. And anyone who wants to code this can do so. This was in
response to the suggestion that LyX lacked this incredibly wonderful and
painfully obvious feature. My point was that it isn't obviously
wonderful. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that, if you think you want
it, you're either wrong or not very focused on writing. But to each his
or her own.
Thanks Richard for the discursive effort! I'm seriously reconsidering my
understanding of WYSIWYG and its typesetting counterpart. I used to think that
focusing on writing means also paying attention to the order of letters, rather
than assuming that this something to do with "style".
No offense intended. But the point is an important one, anyway. I
actually do think that paying too much attention to the order of the
letters impedes writing. If I'm trying to write a paragraph and know I'm
going to change it half a dozen times (at least), why do I care whether
each word has been spelled correctly? That's clean-up, to be done once
I've got the damn thing moderately stable. (That's why I still write so
much with pen and paper, because it's the only way I know to really get
rid of ALL the distractions.) Writing is hard, and I am firmly convinced
that the tools we have grown accustomed to do not make our lives easier.
Those bad habits are hard to unlearn, especially if you're not even
aware you've got them.
If I'm just writing a letter, then maybe that's different, but even then
I'm not sure, actually.
Either way, one thing for sure out of this discussion is that perhaps the
boundaries between "style" and "mere writing" are not as clear cut. Also, of
course, if your texts consists of many formula or a mass of strings of letters
which are not in your dictionary, a on the fly spellcheck becomes utterly
pointless (yes distracting!) and should be switched off. However, this is
exactly what I was trying to say with my (in hindsight probably not very clever)
example of "humanities" writing. For some people, there might not be much
distraction (in form of occasional wavily lines), but rather a continually
indication of your document writing status, which I consider is a basic feature.
Maybe this is true of some documents, and maybe it'd be nice at some
very late stage of the game, when you're just doing clean-up. But I just
offer the suggestion that a continual indication of the status of a
document that is very much in flux is worse than useless.
Richard
--
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Richard G Heck, Jr
Professor of Philosophy
Brown University
http://frege.brown.edu/heck/
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