A computer on another writers desk may not seem like something out of a science fiction movie. Its a common enough presence by now. But for the writer sitting down to write on it, it may lack the comfortable familiary of a typewriter which lets that typewriter, like the pen before it, disappear from between the writer and what he or she is writing. EWriter is built to let the writer experience it as essentially a typewriter, familiarity intact, but with extra freedoms and capabilities. Leftovers from the time of mysteriousness will not help. Word processors, text editors, even notepads (as distinct from pencils or pens with which to write on them) can leave a writer uneasy among things that distract from thinking, imagining, and, in the end, articulating through a hand, armed with pen, keyboard, or keyboard and sidekick mouse.
EWriter is a textwriter. This is the obvious jump to make from the typewriter. Given a typewriter, the writer laid out a proof print of his or her text while writing. The manuscript was in type. The writers sight of what he or she was producing was pulled back into the writing. When IBM brought out its Selectric in the sixties, a poet even had italics for a second voice along with already discovered uses of white space as punctuation. In fact, the italics joined the white space as punctuation, even as earlier ellipses, dashes, and bracketing marks joined the commas and semicolons as punctuation.
The writer using a typewriter writes on a piece of paper by setting one piece of type at a time against the paper. The writing instrument is called a typewriter because it swings that piece of type against the ribbon-covered paper. In eWriter, you will put one character (well, for starters) at a time onto the screen, writing out your text. No impacts by a swinging bar, so the typewriter gentles into a simple textwriter. Rewriting linguistic history in light of our present understanding: We called people using typewriters typists. A writer using the typewriter would him- or herself be a typewriter, a writer using type on a device enabling the writer to do that. This realization follows from now familiar use of ewriting and ewriters, the latter being both the softmachines and the writers using them or their principles.
Nothing complicated to figure out. Everything youre going to do will be either something youve done on a typewriter or a truly simple extension of something youve done on a typewriter. Youll still be writing on a typewriter, in spirit, but its a typewriter that will let you write almost everything you thought typesetters would have to work into your writing for you and a great deal more than typesetters as such could produce.
From text editor to textwriter