Author William Zinsser is known for his book on writing well, On Writing Well, still a popular work on the subject almost half a century after its original publication. Less well known but still worth a read is his Writing to Learn. This is another book of writing advice, but in this case he is discussing how good writing is not only for the professional writer, not just for the poet or the novelist, that it is for the botanist and the physicist, the cello-player and the educator, anyone who want to put what they love about what they do into words.
Originally published in 1988, this was written well before software had started eating the world, when computer programming was still an esoteric subject and computers were filling up entire rooms in universities rather than being so ubiquitous as to be almost cybernetic extensions of ourselves, not yet actually attached to us but always within reach. And so, as you would expect, it does not include technology, computing and computer programming among the subjects it investigates through writing. Of course, there is no reason why writing about computing cannot be good writing, even outside of technical manuals and instructional books; see, for example, Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community.
It was while reading Writing to Learn that I noticed, in the list of “other books by this author,” the title Writing With A Word Processor. I thought, now that is interesting; a whole book just about how to use a word processor? My curiosity was piqued, so I ordered the book, and read it.
First published in 1983, this is a book that is easy to overlook, with its plain cover of white letters in Mrs. Eaves font, centered on a green field, with little to recommend it other than the words “by William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well.” Why bother with a book written so long ago, about such a prosaic subject?
But it turned out to be more interesting than the title suggests. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a book quite like Writing With a Word Processor. That might sound odd; going by the title, this is just a user’s manual for a word processor, isn’t it? But in fact, it is something more than that: it is a story. A story about one individual’s experiences with technology, of the changes that technology imposes on our lives, of the process of learning and adapting as the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and of what technology can do for us.
More specifically, it is a story about his decision to make the jump from writing with a typewriter to a word processor. It begins with him having the realization that computers are now something to take notice of, that writers are ditching their typewriters for these new-fangled contraptions. For Zinsser, a man whose bread and butter was writing, making this transition was a significant event, and this book chronicles his experiences, from the initial hesitation, to the first tentative steps, through the many learning experiences encountered on the way to eventual mastry.
It should be noted that at this time, operating systems had not become the platforms that they are today, and computing systems were sold as a whole package, hardware plus software developed for a specific application. Instead of a piece of software to install alongside everything else on your machine, this was the time of the “information appliance”, the idea being that buying something like a word processor was like buying a dishwasher or refrigerator: it was a large purchase that took up a lot of space in your house, and did one specific thing. So the “word processor” in this case means software, processing unit, monitor, keyboard, mouse and printer. To be specific, what Zinsser ended up purchasing and installing in his home was an IBM Displaywriter. The book’s back cover has him posing with his new electronic partner.
Almost all writing about technology is from the perspective of either an instructor, fluent in the topic, explaining it in a way that can be understood by the uninitiated, or that of an outsider who is reporting on events related to technology, such as in Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. This book is unique in that Zinsser is not writing from the perspective of a technology practitioner or enthusiast, neither as a journalist or documentarian, but of a user and a complete computer novice, describing his struggles to adapt to the changes necessitated by his new writing tool:
I had plunged headlong into a new world which, like any specialized field, had its own vocabulary. The words were strange. Diskette. Program diskette. Work diskette. Work station. Default. Condense. Initialize. They jumped out of the screen and out the instruction manuals, clogging and clouding the brain.
Writing with a Word Processor, William Zinsser, 1983, page 33
There is real drama in his descriptions of the struggles involved in learning to use his word processor. He does a good job of getting across the sense of excitement and trepidation involved with moving from paper to screen, and of the frustration and setbacks he faced along the way.
There are mechanical errors that require a visit from a technician; there are terse, cryptic error messages that condemn the user for their mistakes while giving no indication of what might put them on the right path; there is work suddenly lost, and lost forever, through system malfunction. It is easy to recognize the signs of a difficult, rude, unfriendly system in his descriptions of his interactions with it. All the while, Zinsser is a patient student, learning lesson after hard-earned lesson as the mysteries are unveiled and the doors to understanding unlocked.
Reading of Zinsser’s experiences with his word processor, you witness the process of exploration and discovery taking place, of how he comes to understand the unfamiliar by building up an internal representation, a mental model of how all of these pieces fit together. Mistakes are made, data is lost—and not just data, but writing that was meant for publication—but out of these painful experiences, an outline begins to take shape, the jumble of neologisms starts to form a stable set of relationships.
Looking at the manuals that came with the system, he is overwhelmed by the number of things that it can do. This consternation is alleviated by the thought that he doesn’t have to learn everything, only as much as he needs to know to do the things he wants done. This shift in perspective allows him to forge on in his journey to penetrate this technological labyrinth.
He describes how he came to understand the importance of disks in the system, of figuring out how to navigate through the many menus that made up the interface, and of how the special keys on the keyboard work. He figures out that you can use the space key as a way to highlight every character until the end of a word for deletion. He realizes that there is memory that is only temporary, that disk storage is something other than working memory, and so you must be diligent to save your work to disk regularly.
This book describes all of the tentative steps involved in understanding how a computer works, the feeling of dread that some action you take will have disastrous consequences, and then the satisfaction that comes with understanding and realizing that you can now do something that you couldn’t do before.
There are many, many books written for the purpose of teaching a particular technology, but the list is short of stories told from the perspective of the learner, of the experience of reading manuals, talking to support staff, cataloging all of the starts and stops that are part of the process of going from confusion to understanding. It is in this sense that I mean this is a very unique book, describing an experience that many can relate to and yet is rarely written about.
As someone who has worked with software for many years, and who is always trying to keep up with the rapid churn of technology—now we’re deploying on virtual machines, now containers, now Kubernetes clusters; now we’re writing our applications in Java, now Python, now Node.js, now Golang—I easily recognize the process that Zinsser is describing, the stages that one goes through while learning a new technology, especially a very complex one; from the initial feeling of being overwhelmed by all of the strange new terminology and unexpected behavior, to the beginnings of familiarity when things start to click, when you start to see regularities and patterns, you begin to understand how the pieces of this previously undifferentiated pile fit together to form a picture, and then finally to the sense of mastery you gain after working through the challenges and frustrations.
Despite the fact that I am a professional software developer, so that I’ve developed a fairly sophisticated understanding of how computing systems work, I can nevertheless relate to the experiences Zinsser describes from his perspective as a novice. Most recently, this was similar to my experience with learning Kubernetes, a leviathan of complexity that required many months of study and practice in order to attain a working familiarity with. I had experience with Docker; Kubernetes is kind of like Docker Compose, right? Running a bunch of containers together? And in a sense it is, but it is also much more than that; it is a web of interrelated parts that interact in various ways, and it took many days of constant contact with it to build up enough familiarity that I could feel comfortable with it.
Just like Zinsser, I started out with bunch of pieces that had no obvious relationship, and slowly, step by step, command by command, I created my mental model of how all the pieces fit together. For him it was diskette, memory and print job, while for me it was pod, service, node, cluster, and many other new terms that made up the vocabulary of the new language that I was learning.
While experiencing all of the challenges Zinsser faced as you read—the documentation that is dry and convoluted and yet is supposed to be essential for operating this thing, the errors messages that accuse the user of misconduct, the seemingly random malfunctions—the question naturally arises: is it all worth it? Is it worth the time and frustration that clearly are part of the process?
Our gadgets are much easier to use today, now that a culture of concern for usability and a practice of user-focused design has become an integral part of the development of digital products. But despite not being able to benefit from these improvements in how products are designed, Zinsser nonetheless took the time and endured the frustration involved with purchasing, learning and using this hulking piece of equipment, not to mention the considerable amount of space it took up in his office. And all this just for a tool for writing with, not even for checking email or getting on an internet that didn’t exist in 1983.
The good news is that after all the anxiety produced by this technological intrusion into his life, Zinsser does conclude that it was worth it, that writing with a word processor allows a freedom of editing that a typewriter does not.
It is interesting that there is already, even in this early stage of bulky hardware and unsophisticated software, a tendency to anthropomorphize the computer. Zinsser describes “feeling struck by how often I found myself feeling badly for putting the machine to extra work or making it do a certain job again” (p56).
Really I don’t think we can keep from anthropomorphizing, to some degree, anything we have complex interactions with. I think that this is especially true with computers, partly because we are not able to see the functioning of their inner parts, as we could with something mechanical, so that we cannot attribute their workings to easily identifiable pieces of their construction, but must attempt to understand them using the kind of heuristics we might use to understand other people; and partly, I think, because they communicate with words.
Of course, in most cases the words are just what the developers programmed into the software to display in certain circumstance. But then, a refrigerator, hairdryer or vacuum cleaner, when it breaks down, has no words to communicate with you. Even R2-D2, despite being a little rolling trashcan rather than the fully anthropomorphic kind of robot, could have a personality because it communicated with language of some kind, even it if was only a pseudo-language of unintelligible beeps.
Naturally, there are not many that I can recommend this book to. It is certainly not the classic that On Writing Well is. Still, as I mentioned earlier, there is at least some sense in which this is a very unique book, taking on a subject that is rarely made the subject of writing: the personal experience of acclimating oneself to the presence of a new technology, one that has disrupted and complicated what was once settled and sure.
Maybe today, while AI is seeping into every crack of our digital lives, there are some lessens to be learned from Zinsser and his word processor, as we adjust to the most recent set of technology-driven changes.
The book ends with some writing advice for technical writing, and as you would expect it is very good advice, so that by itself might make it worth a read:
“Only give the reader one thing to think about at a time. Give him short, sequential steps.”
“Readers identify first with the person who is writing, not with what the person is writing about.”
“There’s almost no more beautiful sight than a simple declarative sentence.”