Word: hackers
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Below, the Happy Hacker hopes to give some advice on how to use electronic stimulants to improve writing. And, how to use them to improve grades (often, the Hacker has more success with the latter than the former...
...course, any writer can put in subtitles with a typewriter, but word-processors make the job much easier. Usually, the Hacker recommends centering and using bold print for subtitles. Word-processors also offer an advantage because they allow the writer to change the subtitles easily. Thus, when the Hacker recently has written eight pages of a 10-page paper and then discovered that he had written a different essay than the one assigned, he merely changed the subtitles and re-wrote the introduction and conclusion. Most of the writing remained unchanged. Another advantage of subtitles is that they allow...
...Hacker once started a simple paper assignment--"Show the effects of concept 1 on events A, B and C through X's theoretical analysis of dialecticism." Unfortunately, by the time the Hacker was writting about C, he was repeating what has been said in A and B. Because he didn't read over the content, and only used the spelling checker to check for mistakes, the result was a neat, clean, poorly-written paper. (Re-read the introduction to find out about the grade received...
...Happy Hacker recommends printing out rough drafts and then making written changes on them. Writing is a process that constantly improves itself. Every time a draft is revised, the overall paper is improved. Simply modifying on the computer screen is not the same as having a printed copy to work with--at least not for a true literary hacker who knows the importance of physically (i.e., with a pen) altering draft after draft. A literary hacker, of course, should be distinguished from a literary hack: a person who happily churns out one-draft wonders...
Writers anxious to improve the quality of their prose and arguments should retype major drafts from a print-out. What? Is the Happy Hacker denouncing the key virtue of a word (once-its-there-you-never-have-to-type-it-again) processor? Not really. Rather, the Hacker is suggesting that by occasionally retyping a paper from scratch, the writer is forced to reconsider every word and sentence in a much more active way than simply by dragging a cursor across...