Is WYSIWYG Killing Your Productivity?

 Does M.S.Word, Open Office and the like turn your book-writing dreams into a nightmare? Join the club. Whenever I am writing longer pieces on these standard word processors, their crazy (WYSIWYG), “What you see is what you get” type of writing frequently messed up my day’s work. 

So much so, I had to start with an entirely new document and painstakingly copy and paste the text back and hoping all the time that the mess won’t happen again. Occasionally it did work, and at other times I felt, I could just trash the entire book-writing idea. Have you been at this point? 

This is not surprising, as we are using the absolute wrong tool. Originally these word processors were created to make writing single-paged documents more visual. They are perfect for that, not for book-writing or technical documents.

 Don’t agree? How often have you wrestled with Word after just a regular format change? How often was your work messed up when you pasted an image into the document? However with story writing, it is doing even more harm, because it’s already hard enough, explaining some difficult nonfiction topic, but when your standard variety brain is constantly jumping around and being niggling on your formatting or gets distracted by other visuals, it is almost impossible to finish your book project. We are visual animals, after all, our senses are all dominated by our visual sense. What’s good for writing a letter is, by its design not useful for writing books.WYSIWYG kills your productivity.