Earlier this year, when setting out as a freelance writer, I found myself for the first time without the backing of a work computer with Word or a free student account. I faced a dilemma: to pay or not to pay for Microsoft Word. With a perfectly good word processor attached to my Gmail, was it really worth about $7 or $8 per month to be able to type onto the traditional white page I was used to? What settled it was the realization that I needed trusty old Word to communicate with my hopefully soon-to-be editors. Track Changes was the language in which the writer-editor conversation was carried out, at least in my experience. Even if I were to convert my Google words to Word words, and my editor’s Word edits to Google edits, and download my Google response to those edits as a Word response to be sent back, too much could get lost in translation.
Read more ‘Journalists Just Can’t Quit Microsoft Word. But Some Are Trying.’ at slate.com
Rachel Rose Withers 