Bashers & Swoopers

How the tools we use for writing are letting us down.

Reading is a linear process. One word after another, from the start to the end. Some people write that way too. Kurt Vonnegut called them Bashers.

“Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.”

If you’re a Basher, technology has had you covered for about 300 years. Early writing machines were noisy, unreliable and slow — which made them perfect for bashing.

But they were also inflexibly linear. One word after another, one page after another. The mechanism of the typewriter pulled the writing inexorably forward.

300 years later, the vast majority of our tools are all still organised around this idea of a linear document. Word, Pages, iA Writer, even the editor here at Medium. For all the advances in technology, writing in these tools still has only one dimension.