A teaser for the review
explains that “a new crop of startups is gearing up to change
the way we write, taking on traditional authoring tools such as Microsoft Word,
Google Docs, and WordPress. The newcomers don’t just promise to make it easy to
create documents or write blog posts—they promise to make you smarter.”
Ford finds Fargo, a simple yet powerful
outlining tool, particularly appealing, noting that “with an outlining program,
you don’t need a clumsy numbering system, because the computer does the
bookkeeping for you.” Ford also appreciates the flexibility in such programs,
describing an outliner as something that “treats a text as a set of Lego bricks
to be pulled apart and reassembled until the most pleasing structure is found...That’s
the thing about outlines: they can become anything.”
Editorially is a pared-down text editor that, like
Fargo, runs in a web browser. Ford calls Editorially’s focus “rigidly on
composing,” describing its editing screen as “one huge blank field with only a
few options.” However, with this simplicity comes useful options for
collaboration; every edit made by collaborators (or a single author) is
tracked, and a timeline function lets users go back to a past moment in the
text’s creation.
Medium, yet another web-based platform, is better
suited to blogging and other web writing by an individual. The program suggests
a structure for the piece, and once the text is published, other uses can leave
feedback for the author in the form of comments that, in this context, serve
more as marginal notes. Ford says that “the ‘Medium Post’ is emerging as its
own sort of thing—not quite a blog post, not quite an article, but something in
between.”
Ford describes but doesn’t review a number of other platforms
still in development. Marquee calls itself a “flexible platform that’s perfect
for telling stories,” while Scroll Kit is “a new type of content editor that allows you to own the page in
one click.” Ghost is a blogging platform that Ford characterizes as “a sort of
modernization of WordPress.” A departure from these web-based platforms is
Quip, an iOS app.
One
thing most of these new tools have in common is that they’re designed for collaboration.
According to Ford, the developers of these new platforms are “building tools
for reflective thought. They expect their users to contemplate, revise,
collaborate—in short, to work more the way writers historically have written,
and as the pioneers of the digital revolution expected people to continue to
write.” To Ford, the proliferation of such collaborative efforts proves “that
there are enough people willing to give up the quick pleasures of the tweet or
Facebook post and return to the hard business of writing whole paragraphs that
are themselves part of a larger structure of argument.”
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