But Microsoft Word is writing software, and those who look down their noses at writers using dedicated "writing software" instead of a plain old word processor may find themselves in turn looked down on from above the noses of those clacking away at an Olivetti. In an earlier post, I said that the word processor was essentially a straightforward replacement for its analogue equivalent, the typewriter, but that statement was overly simplistic. Even ignoring the vast number of tools that modern word processors now have built into them, from mail-merge to bibliography management, it's easy to forget just how revolutionary programs such as WordPerfect, WordStar and Microsoft Word (and, to a lesser extent, the physical word processors that preceded them) were when we first started using them in place of typewriters. Cut, Copy and Paste have removed a great deal of agony from the way we edit and revise documents, and while we now take the ability to select a word and type over it for granted, I'm sure Peggy would have appreciated just how much repetition and time such seemingly small features can save when she was ordered to re-type that letter in the first episode of Mad Men. I'm so used to hitting "Undo" nowadays that when I break a mug or put my foot in my mouth in real life, I find myself mentally reaching for the Cmd-Z keyboard combo.

Whether you love them, are indifferent to them, or blame them for increasing the temptation of endlessly tinkering with your text like a modern William Langland, word processors are so much more than typewriters. But like all software, word processors were designed for a specific purpose (even if in some cases that purpose has got a little blurred), and to that end it's worth remembering that just because Word tends to be our first go-to these days for tasks for which we might previously have used pen and paper, it is not a replacement for all that we do with paper or files (after all, we cannot play tic-tac-toe in a Word document nor turn it into a paper airplane -- unless we print it first).

What word processors do is this: They provide anybody with a way of creating a professional-looking, typeset document, and a way to edit, refine and polish that document. Whether you're creating a memo, a newsletter, a lost-cat poster or writing a letter ("It looks like you're writing a letter; can I help?"), a word processor allows you to produce documents of a presentational standard that most people couldn't have achieved 20 years ago.

Word processors enable us to produce good-looking documents -- but do they encourage us to focus on the content? Presentation is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to producing a text, especially a long and difficult text that involves a complex structure. The trouble is that presentation is the raison d'être of most word processors -- Apple's Pages, for instance, boasts "a beautifully designed, professional-quality document created in minutes." The time it takes to compose the content presumably isn't a factor. Moreover, while textual content is always the author's concern, the final presentation is often someone else's -- and even if the author is self-publishing or writing a thesis that has to be presented in a particular way, the writing process rarely benefits from worrying about typesetting options simultaneously with trying to choose the right words. This isn't to disagree with Kierkegaard's assertion that what constitutes a classic work is the coherence of its form and content: for all but the most experimental of texts, "form" doesn't usually equate to font choice (or else literature professors would be apoplectic every time a new edition of a classic was published).