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In 1984, author Ray Hammond reminded readers that ‘the computer has no power to write words.’
As large language models (LLMs) reshape writing today, it’s worth reflecting on the last seismic shift in creative technology: the rise of the word processor.
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The Processing of Words
I have come to a realisation: I am not a writer.
I have friends who are – creative craftsmen with a natural affinity for narrative, or the shape of arguments. They know how to let words flow one after another, forming a coherent whole.
My writing on the other hand happens in the edit. I don’t write words I process them. Battering at them like a lump of clay. Cut, Copy, Paste, Highlight, Delete, Overwrite, Move, Drag, and Drop.
Words are a medium, to be processed.
I’ve come to this conclusion after reading Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum. It’s an amazing book about the creation and adoption of word processing. A technology that has profoundly reshaped not just how we write, but the structure of our own thoughts. As we face a new revolution in literary technologies with LLMs, learning more about earlier revolution felt pressing.
I was born in 1985. I first encountered word processing software at school when I was about nine or ten. For me, and anyone younger, it’s hard to grasp how revolutionary the adoption of word processors was. We take it for granted that words are fluid behind polished glass. But for those who lived through it, followed immediately by the advent of the Internet, the impact was monumental.
Until reading Track Changes, I hadn’t realised the sheer hostility word processors faced—especially from the creative class. There was outright vitriol. Processing was for vegetables not words went one refrain. Some writers even hid their use of word processors to avoid suspicions of automation or inauthenticity.
In 1984 Alan Hollinghurst, deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement, worried that “style deteriorates … people write more laxly”. Others dismissed word processors as inefficient or even harmful tools.
A 1982 Writer’s Digest feature on writing novels with computers triggered an avalanche of angry letters. “Typing made easy with personal computers, not writing,” one person fumed.
Meanwhile, sci-fi writers like John Varley joked about using only “natural ingredients” like typewriters and creativity, while evangelists declared word processors as revolutionary as the printing press. Looking back, those hypebeasts were onto something—our lives today revolve around processed words.
One concern at the time was that people might mistake draft-quality work as finished, given the polished look of typeset text. Iris Murdoch lamented that staring at a glowing screen separated writers from their thoughts, giving them a “premature air of completeness.”
The history of word processing is tightly entwined with management consulting and workplace misogyny. The early word processors of the 1970’s were marketed as business tools, not creative ones.
IBM’s marketing team coined the term ‘word processor’ to describe the function of its new machines. But the concept quickly became tied to a reductive view of secretarial labour.
‘Mad Men style’ management consultants in the late 1970’s pushed hard to dehumanise the secretarial role. Arguing that typing should be a mechanical input-output activity done by a type of worker, rather than individual secretaries who – shock horror, might have opinions and advice after working so closely alongside male executives in the workplace.
The original word processors were women behind typewriters.
It’s disturbing to read how consultants actively worked to strip secretaries of their agency and autonomy in the workplace, seeing their work as something to measured by word count, accuracy and typing speed. Moving them out of the bosses office and into soul destroying typing pools.
Some fears about word processors, though, have come true.
In the 1984 the author Ray Hammond found it necessary to remind his readers that “the computer has no power to write words.” Many authors feared that readers would not understand the technology and instead would think the computer had ‘written the book for them’.
The invention of the word processor didn’t just change how writers think in text. It also shifted the labour of writing and publishing. Authors in the 1950s hammered out their manuscripts on typewriters, and sent it off, leaving the task of correcting grammar and spelling to literal copy editors. People who copied the first draft into a cleaned up text.
Word processors mostly pushed those tasks back onto the authors themselves.
By the late-1990s, most objections to word processors had subsided. Personal computers became the default tool. But it’s worth noting, that word processors were never designed for creative writers – they were business tools first and foremost. We still call them documents. It wasn’t until a later generation of software—like Scrivener—that word processing became more attuned to the needs of writers. And we still lack true hypertext first writing software.
I suspect we’ll see a similar evolution with LLMs. Right now things are being built for business, with a huge push to replace workers. But eventually we’ll get new creative interfaces, new tools, and eventually, new norms about how we think about the production of creative work.
Before anyone objects, it’s worth noting there was also a backlash in the 90’s against tools like spell check and grammar suggestions – tools that are now seen as essential.
Lastly, on a somewhat related note: I recently showed a retired boomer Stable Diffusion. It was their first time seeing image generation in action. They shrugged and said they assumed that’s what people using Photoshop had been doing for the last 20 years. lol
Maybe the fears of the past weren’t so unfounded after all. Or maybe, like before, we’ll adapt, evolve, and thrive in this new era of creative tools.
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