As Ken Wark argued in an essay published in Meanjin earlier this year: “The adventure happens in the making, before the work is finished. What readers seem to want is ‘space’ for the issue at hand to be explored in a conversational fashion. There is no point in putting a perky ‘what do you think’ at the end of a post if you don’t really care.Ĭertainly, though, authority and control are not what a writer is rewarded for these days. This can lead to more engaging and relaxed work but it’s an approach that has to be careful not to become disingenuous. The most noticeable impact of this is the fact that when blogging or writing essays (for both print and online papers/journals) one gets a greater response from pieces with more of a sense of openness. This century, the range of softwares used and digital forums available has multiplied. It’s important to note this - new programs can both facilitate a writer’s strengths and encourage their weaknesses and a good writer, over time, learns to work in a way that plays to the former, not the latter. Over that decade though, authors came to understand this and, to some extent, learned to compensate for the ease with which Word allowed them to call something a draft. It would be fair to say that they were less tightly drafted than the ones that used to arrive, typewritten, with a ribbon tying them together - there is nothing like the labor intensiveness of having to retype every word of every draft to force a writer to kill their darlings.

I first noticed a shift back in the early 90s, when authors were submitting manuscripts they’d written entirely on their computers, using (usually) Microsoft Word.

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