How can I use Word to make myself do the right part of the writing task?
March 25, 2022 12:06 PM Subscribe
My habit is to do the whole writing process at once - writing, editing, formatting, etc. I need tech ways of stopping myself from doing this and doing one at a time. I really want it to be within Word but tell me if you know something else. I would honestly learn VBA if I had to. I want to prevent myself from writing - so nothing other than moving or deleting text.
I have an irresistible habit, compulsion, whatever when I'm writing or editing to jump right in and start wordsmithing when that's truly not what needs to happen. It's not really perfectionism driven, I really enjoy it and it's a really deep habit also related to caring too much about what people think. But, most of the time, it's highly unnecessary in my work to turn good writing into great writing. Most of the time I just need to do functionally adequate writing. It's an ADHD issue also where I just do whatever task is in front of me, which on a bad day, is perfecting this single sentence.
It's a 15 year habit I've got lots of processes, strategies, etc for dealing with it in the works, but what would be ideal is if there was a technological solution to help me along - preventing me from doing anything but deleting and moving text. Ideally within Word, but I have also been playing around with using Excel as a writing tool so that might be part of it.
Hoping you all don't mind, I have just written this as I thought it and not tried too much organize it all to be more sensible - this will illustrate the problem.
The way that my brain tends to work is I think by writing and produce giant piles of writing (dictating, etc), but then I really struggle to make it into a useful finished product. As I'm doing that, I constantly find myself changing up turns of phrase, etc without thinking about it.
This is part of a bigger project of creating structure around my writing process so it happens in stages. I've got lots of things I need to try to use my willpower for, so technological solutions are what I'm hoping for.
So for the details - in terms of "stopping myself", I think all I need is for my immediate impulse to be stopped - so it's okay if it's easy to turn this off.
One thing I do is just print it, cut it up, etc - but this then takes work to transfer back (though now that I'm talking out loud, could scan and convert to text).
I think it might be difficult to stop from typing text but also allowing me to copy it in. I could click and drag it around, but that's less useful. Likely what I'd be doing is having two windows of the same document so that I can move from one place to another.
I have been increasingly involving Excel and Visio in my writing process, so that could come in as well - like I have been experimenting with linking Visio to Word so I can drag phrases/paragraphs around, connect it with arrows, and the connections get synced back. This helps also because the habits in Word are far more ingrained. But for smaller letters and things, being able to flip a switch in Word to do this would be awesome. Extra double bonus points for Outlook but it's much less likely I think.
It occurs to me now that instead of just deleting, I could just change format and select all to delete later - but ideally I would be able to do both.
One of the things I have used is "Group" under the developer tools (for creating forms) to lock things in - this is useful, but very limiting.
It might be that there are multiple pieces of this - like if there were something, on my whole computer, I could use to say only write and no delete, or only delete 10 characters or something that'd be a really useful part.
Customizability would be ideal - still experimenting with how the writing process would work best, so if I can tweak whatever this is as that process goes, that would be ideal. Another app designed for writing that does something similar might be useful, but not nearly as much so - I want to be able to incorporate something like this into my existing Office workflow by one means or another without having to get into the habit of switching to some other app.
If you know of another place where I should ask this that would also be helpful. When I google Word stuff there's all kinds of forums but they're often ancient and I don't know what is active (usually ancient stuff still works though).
If you can think of any little pieces along the way that could be part of something like this as well, that would be great. Even if you think like, "I'm a programmer and I could make this happen", get in touch! This is like my number one work problem and I've very invested in working on it.
Hopefully that's enough thoughts to help - basically, I want to be able to flip a switch between "Write" and "Edit" to help break the process up. Anything you can think of that would help I'd love to hear it!
(P.S. as I read this back I unconsciously started changing little things around so I really truly need this!)
I have an irresistible habit, compulsion, whatever when I'm writing or editing to jump right in and start wordsmithing when that's truly not what needs to happen. It's not really perfectionism driven, I really enjoy it and it's a really deep habit also related to caring too much about what people think. But, most of the time, it's highly unnecessary in my work to turn good writing into great writing. Most of the time I just need to do functionally adequate writing. It's an ADHD issue also where I just do whatever task is in front of me, which on a bad day, is perfecting this single sentence.
It's a 15 year habit I've got lots of processes, strategies, etc for dealing with it in the works, but what would be ideal is if there was a technological solution to help me along - preventing me from doing anything but deleting and moving text. Ideally within Word, but I have also been playing around with using Excel as a writing tool so that might be part of it.
Hoping you all don't mind, I have just written this as I thought it and not tried too much organize it all to be more sensible - this will illustrate the problem.
The way that my brain tends to work is I think by writing and produce giant piles of writing (dictating, etc), but then I really struggle to make it into a useful finished product. As I'm doing that, I constantly find myself changing up turns of phrase, etc without thinking about it.
This is part of a bigger project of creating structure around my writing process so it happens in stages. I've got lots of things I need to try to use my willpower for, so technological solutions are what I'm hoping for.
So for the details - in terms of "stopping myself", I think all I need is for my immediate impulse to be stopped - so it's okay if it's easy to turn this off.
One thing I do is just print it, cut it up, etc - but this then takes work to transfer back (though now that I'm talking out loud, could scan and convert to text).
I think it might be difficult to stop from typing text but also allowing me to copy it in. I could click and drag it around, but that's less useful. Likely what I'd be doing is having two windows of the same document so that I can move from one place to another.
I have been increasingly involving Excel and Visio in my writing process, so that could come in as well - like I have been experimenting with linking Visio to Word so I can drag phrases/paragraphs around, connect it with arrows, and the connections get synced back. This helps also because the habits in Word are far more ingrained. But for smaller letters and things, being able to flip a switch in Word to do this would be awesome. Extra double bonus points for Outlook but it's much less likely I think.
It occurs to me now that instead of just deleting, I could just change format and select all to delete later - but ideally I would be able to do both.
One of the things I have used is "Group" under the developer tools (for creating forms) to lock things in - this is useful, but very limiting.
It might be that there are multiple pieces of this - like if there were something, on my whole computer, I could use to say only write and no delete, or only delete 10 characters or something that'd be a really useful part.
Customizability would be ideal - still experimenting with how the writing process would work best, so if I can tweak whatever this is as that process goes, that would be ideal. Another app designed for writing that does something similar might be useful, but not nearly as much so - I want to be able to incorporate something like this into my existing Office workflow by one means or another without having to get into the habit of switching to some other app.
If you know of another place where I should ask this that would also be helpful. When I google Word stuff there's all kinds of forums but they're often ancient and I don't know what is active (usually ancient stuff still works though).
If you can think of any little pieces along the way that could be part of something like this as well, that would be great. Even if you think like, "I'm a programmer and I could make this happen", get in touch! This is like my number one work problem and I've very invested in working on it.
Hopefully that's enough thoughts to help - basically, I want to be able to flip a switch between "Write" and "Edit" to help break the process up. Anything you can think of that would help I'd love to hear it!
(P.S. as I read this back I unconsciously started changing little things around so I really truly need this!)
I'm not going to recommend a way to do this in Word because A) I don't know of one, B) I don't like Word, and C) if there is a way, it seems like it would be error-prone and kludgey.
You might want to look into Scrivener.
You also might want to consider writing in a plain-text editor. I'm a big proponent of writing everything in Markdown, and if you need to convert that to a Word doc, you can. This doesn't remove the option of editing while you write, but it does take away the opportunity to noodle over formatting.
posted by adamrice at 12:32 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
You might want to look into Scrivener.
You also might want to consider writing in a plain-text editor. I'm a big proponent of writing everything in Markdown, and if you need to convert that to a Word doc, you can. This doesn't remove the option of editing while you write, but it does take away the opportunity to noodle over formatting.
posted by adamrice at 12:32 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Seconding Scrivener, which separates the writing process from formatting. (In Scrivener, formatting can be applied to the finished text through a process called "compiling." It's quite powerful.)
posted by SPrintF at 12:43 PM on March 25, 2022
posted by SPrintF at 12:43 PM on March 25, 2022
Best answer: Honestly? I'd unplug the keyboard for the editing part. That would force you to use the onscreen keyboard for whatever limited typing you need to do while editing. Does disable keyboard shortcuts though.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 1:09 PM on March 25, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by I claim sanctuary at 1:09 PM on March 25, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yeah, Word makes everything formatwise very complicated because its whole purpose is to let you customize everything.
You could try hitting View> Outline, which seems to be designed for the purpose you mention.
Or, hit View> Reading view, which only lets you read the text and not make edits. You'd have to make notes of your formatting changes and add them once you exit Reading view.
posted by winterportage at 1:39 PM on March 25, 2022
You could try hitting View> Outline, which seems to be designed for the purpose you mention.
Or, hit View> Reading view, which only lets you read the text and not make edits. You'd have to make notes of your formatting changes and add them once you exit Reading view.
posted by winterportage at 1:39 PM on March 25, 2022
Learn 'vi', sorry, Unix joke that is the same as just use a plain old text editor to type your stuff and then import that into Word to do the editing/formatting later. It's funny because vi/vim would take you an hour to just learn how to save/quit and then another year before you'd learn enough to ditch Word. Probably the most evil (heh) suggestion. You should probably use Notepad or Scrivener for your draft.
posted by zengargoyle at 4:52 PM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by zengargoyle at 4:52 PM on March 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: I claim sanctuary, your answer sparked another line of thinking and my partner suggested some kind of mappable key arrangement.
I probably use at least 10-15 keyboard shortcuts while doing this, including for example word headings and other custom styles and macros (unfortunately, abandoning Word is not on the table as a lawyer and due to how particular my usage of it is, as well as having to open and edit documents other people are working on).
Is there some kind of way of either temporarily changing the mapping on my keyboard to match a set of keyboard shortcuts or keys or attaching something externally?
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:36 PM on March 25, 2022
I probably use at least 10-15 keyboard shortcuts while doing this, including for example word headings and other custom styles and macros (unfortunately, abandoning Word is not on the table as a lawyer and due to how particular my usage of it is, as well as having to open and edit documents other people are working on).
Is there some kind of way of either temporarily changing the mapping on my keyboard to match a set of keyboard shortcuts or keys or attaching something externally?
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:36 PM on March 25, 2022
Best answer: Attach a separate keyboard for this purpose with some keys removed? You wouldn't need to remove many for it to be unusable for typing regular words.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 8:28 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 8:28 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: I have settled on a solution for now, inspired by the excellent Occam's Razor "unplug the keyboard" suggestion. I have used Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to create a custom keyboard layout where a bunch of the keys other than those used for shortcuts are removed, and set it up to change with hotkeys. I am going to try to come up with some associated way of showing on the screen that I'm in edit "mode". I may also remap a useless key using PowerToys to turn this on and off.
Everyone's answers are much appreciated!
posted by lookoutbelow at 8:41 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Everyone's answers are much appreciated!
posted by lookoutbelow at 8:41 PM on March 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
Use a basic editor like Wordpad (Windows) or Notes (MacOS) to do the draft.
Use Word with the formatting toolbars hidden to do the editing. (Create a shortcut that links to an Editing template you create with those toolbars hidden.)
Unhide the formatting toolbars for the final steps.
You can set up shortcut keys to make it more automatic (say, Ctrl-Alt-D to do the draft in Wordpad, Ctrl-Alt-E to bring up Word with the Editing template, and Ctrl-Alt-F to bring up Word in normal mode for the final formatting.)
posted by Hardcore Poser at 12:26 PM on March 25, 2022