For writing (and programming, for that matter) getting a really good tool should be pretty easy. Give me a credit card and google.com and I can buy any number o

For writing (and programming, for that matter) getting a really good tool should be pretty easy. Give me a credit card and google.com and I can buy any number of quality text editing/word processing programs in about 5 mins. Writers figure out what works for them and stick with it (my wife used AppleWorks forever; George R.R. Martin still uses WordStar on a DOS machine.) Programmers similarly establish their preference (which is why over-30-year old text editors like emacs and vi have such strong adherents). The original off-topic message in this thread was about how people continue to write poorly, even after they have great tools. That doesn't surprise me at all. The hard part is learning the craft. For most people, it's also not a lot of fun. It's a lot more fun to "look for the right tool."