Point of this post is about why I did it, with no apologies for theįact that many of these reasons may not be compelling to everyone. Still want) to write this way, using nothing more than a text editor and Want to focus on the specific, idiosyncratic reasons why I wanted (and Of course, what is possible is not always desirable, and in this post I It is possible to writeĪcademic publications in plain text, and in fact, Lincoln Mullen and I I’ve done the same thing now with aĬonference paper and journal article, too. Before submitting the manuscript to my press, I convertedĪll of my plain text files, complete with notes about what to italicizeĪnd where to place footnotes, to Microsoft Word documents using a simple In fact, I wrote the entirety of my academicīook, forthcoming in early 2013, in plain Insuperable obstacles for the academic historian who wants to use plain I’m writing this post partly to tell you that none of these are Want our work to be submitted as Word documents, not as text files. 1 Journals and academic presses generally Most of all, we need footnotes andĪll the bibliographic trappings that, “like the high whine of theĭentist’s drill,” assure the reader that we are serious professionalsĪnd have done our homework. We need the kinds of formatting-like boldface and italics-thatĭo not exist in a plain text file. Most of us still intend for our writing to end up on a printed Nonetheless, academic writers-and particularly historians-may wellīe skeptical about whether working in plain text can really work for In fact, I don’t even have to make the general caseįor using plain text here people like David Do a simple search for writing inĪnd you’ll find thousands of people making the case for using a fileįormat (*.txt) that worked long before Microsoft Word was a sparkle inīill Gates’s eye. These days, it seems like the ancient past of personal computing isīecoming the wave of the future.
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