Writing with a Word Processor

For someone who does a lot of writing one of the most wonderful modern inventions is the word processor. It saves heaps of time and paper and gives the writer so much more freedom in producing their most creative and finely-tuned work.

How well I remember the old days when I had to use screeds of large writing pads to do my creative writing. Although I can and do print very neatly a lot of the time - and can write incredibly fast too - when I was doing lengthy creative writing, my mind would be working so furiously that my hand just couldn't keep up and I would end up with pages full of scrawl. Then these pages would need to be rewritten with a host of changes - but what a headache that process was. Trying to organize pages of a very rough first draft was such a challenge. It was enormously stressful and frustrating. I can still see in my mind's eye the piles of screwed-up paper that I would end up with. It was neither kind to my state of mind, nor to the environment! I learned to touch-type at school and have always enjoyed typing - but I didn't even have a typewriter of my own till I was doing a secretarial course after I finished high school. Then it was just a little portable manual typewriter. Even using that didn't improve things enormously for me. I would still write my first draft on a big pad - then begin the laborious task of typing it up. Although I loved typing, I did make my share of typos - and I believe now that one typo would lead to another in a snowballing fashion - my frustration only adding to my inclination to hit the wrong keys. These days, with a word processor, because I can correct mistakes so easily, I don't seem to make anywhere near as many - and that's all the more significant because I can type so much faster too.