From Oliver Reichenstein of iA Writer, a celebration of Markdown: “Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish.”
The formatting fetish? That would be the attention to fonts, margins, and other elements of design available in Microsoft Word. As I liked to tell my students, “Writing is not word processing,” and I still consider a word-processing window a hostile workplace. I’ve been writing with Markdown in iA Writer since 2021.
You can find Markdown (it’s free and ridiculously easy to learn) at Daring Fireball.
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Markdown FTW
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comments: 3
There's a word, handwriting, which of course means writing with your hand. When I thought of that last sentence and the word "word," I didn't think w-o-r-d. My brain and my fingers supplied those letters. Pre-computer, I composed my dissertation on a manual typewriter. I taught college-level writing for fifty years, and I respectfully disagree. Writing with a pen, a typewriter, or a word-processor adds to the thinking and the composing process. Word processing is writing. The medium is the message.
I’m thinking of all the bells and whistles that present themselves in Microsoft Word, all the formatting options that are specific to word processing. I like the idea of a plain box on the screen, no styling necessary except for italics for titles and indenting for block quotations. But whatever works!
Geo-B, do you mean “The Medium is the Massage”? (Weird story behind that title.)
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