Instructors who wanted very specific formatting, then insisted on an editing format for submitted assignments, like .doc, instead of a presentation/print format

Instructors who wanted very specific formatting, then insisted on an editing format for submitted assignments, like .doc, instead of a presentation/print format like PDF, were tons of fun. > The kids are allowed to use any app that will capture their text, and they seem to prefer Google Docs. School kids around here prefer Google Docs mostly because they can chat in it. Agreed about ditching the word processing. Most of its use in business isn't even writing original documents, from what I've seen, but filling in the blanks in a template or editing an earlier document (a proposal, say) for a slightly different situation. Composing long form prose in a word processor is, as you note, far less common than doing the same in an email field or in some basic text editor which'll be copy-pasted to an email. Italics and such are still useful. Headers to some extent. Links, certainly. So... I say if we're gonna teach them formatting, teach them a little Markdown. Sure it may go out of style pretty soon, but so might anything. Meanwhile, it can be authored in any text editor, it mimics plain-text formatting styles that have been around for a while and seem to have some staying power, and some of the messaging apps the kids already use (Whatsapp, for instance) support a subset of it. It also introduces the idea of text as instructions to the computer, instantly making computer code less alien.