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I summarize this to my students using two laws and two postulates. Two laws: (1) For long documents, especially if they require citations, bibliographies,
by ehudla 11y ago
I summarize this to my students using two laws and two postulates.
Two laws:
(1) For long documents, especially if they require citations, bibliographies, mathematical notation, etc. – Word is a poor choice.
(2) For documents that take a long time to write and that you want to survive a long time – Word is a poor choice.
The problem is that the alternative is to learn a new way of doing things, which may have a long learning curve. So don't kill your research by wasting time learning new tools. But if you can spare some time to learn better tools, you should.
To understand the alternative, you need to internalize the two postulates:
(1) You should use tools that focus on the semantic aspects of the text, not it's visual appearance. For example: tools that encourage you to say “this is a chapter heading” are good, tools that encourage you to sat “this is Arial-14” are bad.
(2) You should save your work in standard file formats. For text, which is most of what we produce, this means TEXT FILES, not Word documents (.doc,.docx) that tend to break when they switch versions.
- amelius 11y ago> You should use tools that focus on the semantic aspects of the text, not it's visual appearance. For example: tools that encourage you to say “this is a chapter heading” are good, tools that encourage you to sat “this is Arial-14” are bad. All modern text processing systems can do that, including Word and Google Docs. > that tend to break when they switch versions. I don't see the problem. I have two other postulates. (1) While you are writing research papers or even a thesis, you should not change the version of your word processor (2) While writing, you should focus on the content, not on the formatting. Follow these laws, and you will do just fine with any decent word processor.
- ehudla 11y agoAs the saying goes, good luck with that. Indeed with strict discipline you can use semantic styles in Word and other tools. People typically don't and the default behavior in many cases is annoying or leads to problems (copying style, when you intend to copy just the text and so on). And, fiddling with these things takes a lot of time. As for software versions, moving operating systems, computer crashes and the like -- things happen when you are working on a dissertation and any other long term project, and you end up trying to rescue your files. Moreover, when you are a scholar, you often find yourself needing stuff you prepared decades earlier. In many cases the versions are not even easily available, if at all (Word 2.0, anyone?) There are tons of sites by academics detailing these scenarios with more details. I submitted a few links to HN a few minutes ago.