How do you write? Do you write the first draft out in longhand? Are you someone who makes a lot of changes?
I was surprised to find that they still make stand-alone word processors. For your stated purpose, the one you linked to would likely be far more useful than a typewriter. However, if it were me I would still want to load it into a pc in order to do my editing. Keep in mind that with a typewriter you will need to type at least two copies (the first draft and the final draft). Furthermore, getting it to its final destination will require scanning it into a computer.
Writers that I know who want a distraction free experience simply have a computer that is not attached to the internet.
I’m bidding on ebay on an electronic word processor, ends soon so hopefully I get it for a good price.
The reasons I went with the WP:
-Portability is good, I can write in bed, on the couch, anywhere. This is possible on a laptop I suppose but it’s too easy to load a laptop up with games or internet and miss the purpose.
-It can be a USB keyboard and then I can tell it to scan the text into any word processor. Which will require editing and formatting of course, but my main bottleneck to my writing right now is to actually get thoughts down to paper beyond extensive note taking (I work a fulltime job and a part time job and have way too many activities).
I was never fully jazzed about a manual typewriter because of having to learn it, and I move frequently and they’re very heavy, and while I am good at fixing electronics, moving parts are pretty much magic to me.
I may be among the last to have been taught to use a slide rule. When I was in high school, four-function calculators had just become cheap enough for ordinary people to buy - about $30 or so. Our chem teacher (junior year, 1973-74) insisted that everyone in the class had use a slide rule, even if they had a calculator, as probably more than half of us did. After all, you might not have a calculator handy when you needed one!
I may have actually been the last at my high school to receive formal instruction in the slide rule. I was pretty much the math/science teacher’s pet and while rummaging around in the teacher’s supply room one day came across the giant display sized slide rule. I had some vague understanding what it was but by this time (1976) calculators had completely taken over. I pestered him to teach me how to use it and he did. I promptly went out and found one of my own, just for the nerd value I think. Today I have a small collection thanks to Ebay. I even have a plastic pocket sized Picket I keep in the glove box for calculating gas mileage at the pump, again mostly for the nerd value, to draw looks and to start up conversations. Well, and to pick up girls at one time but oddly that never seemed to work for whatever reason.
I’m an engineer so I’m always about the application of math to real world problems rather than math for its own sake. I don’t understand how a course can teach logarithms without at least touching on the slide rule, but mine did, and I suspect it’s even worse today. I think the slide rule (even if you never use one) is fundamental to getting a “feel” for logarithms. But I’m odd, so people tell me.
I graduated from high school in 1984, and we still received instructions on how to use a slide rule then. This was in physics class, though, which I took in eleventh and twelfth grades. Mr Hovey felt that learning to use a slide rule would teach us how to read a scale and to understand orders of magnitude.
Some of the students mentioned the trouble they had trying to buy a slide rule. Imagine walking into an office supply store in the early 1980s and asking the proprietor where he kept the slide rules. I was lucky, though, in that I had an older brother who had already been through Mr Hovey’s class, so I could use his slide rule.
Using a typewriter for serious work will drive you crazy — unless you’re like Isaac Asimov who claimed he hardly ever made a mistake. And even he switched to a word processor, long before personal computers came onto the scene.
Moving paragraphs would mean retyping entire pages or much bigger chunks. Typos mean erasing or using some product like Liquid Paper (still available?) or typing ZXZXZXZXZXZXZX (this uses two fingers, so it’s faster) over the errors RETURN ZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZX RETURN, out of paper, ziiiiiiipppppp, crank, crank, crank. “Oh no! I’m out of paper! And I just bought a ream!”
If your work is to be published, would the house even accept paper now? You might end up having to retype it all into a computer/word processor. (That Neo in the link reminds me of a Radio Shack/Tandy Trash-80. Great when it was introduced, landfill as soon as bigger screens came along.)
Using a typewriter for serious work would be like driving a Model T on a cross-country trip — in winter. Fun and romantic in your raccoon coat for the first 10 miles. After that, not so much.
The word processor and/or keyboard would only be intended to do drafts, not to submit anything or edit. Typos wouldn’t matter for my useage, I can edit on a computer, it is the composition phase that is tripping me up.
