Word Processing on Your Mac Some of us are old enough to recall life before word processors. (It wasn’t that long ago.) Consider this sentence: How did we survive in the days before every last one of us had access to word processors and computers on our respective desks? That’s not a great sentence — it’s kind of wordy and repetitious. The following sentence is much more concise: It’s hard to imagine how any of us got along without word processors. The purpose of this mini-editing exercise is to illustrate the splendor of word processing.

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Had you produced these sentences on a typewriter instead of a computer, changing even a few words would hardly seem worth it. You would have to use correction fluid to erase your previous comments and type over them. If things got really messy, or if you wanted to take your writing in a different direction, you would end up yanking the sheet of paper from the typewriter in disgust and begin pecking away anew on a blank page. Word processing lets you substitute words at will, move entire blocks of text around with panache, and apply different fonts and typefaces to the characters. You won’t even take a productivity hit swapping typewriter ribbons in the middle of a project. Before running out to buy Microsoft Word (or another industrial-strength and expensive) word processing program for your Mac, remember that Apple includes a respectable word processor with OS X. The program is TextEdit, and it call s the Applications folder home.

The first order of business when using TextEdit (or pretty much any word processor) is to create a new document. There’s really not much to it.

It’s about as easy as opening the program itself. The moment you do so, a window with a large blank area on which to type appears. Have a look around the window. At the top, you see Untitled because no one at Apple is presumptuous enough to come up with a name for your yet-to-be-produced manuscript. Notice the blinking vertical line at the upper-left edge of the screen, just below the ruler. That line, called the insertion point, might as well be tapping out Morse code for “start typing here.” Indeed, you have come to the most challenging point in the entire word processing experience, and it has nothing to do with technology.

The burden is on you to produce clever, witty, and inventive prose, lest all that blank space go to waste.