WRITEMONKEY FOCUSWRITER FULL

They point, for instance, to one interviewee’s gardening activity “as material, affective, and motivational context-building, creating the conditions that would best serve her tasks of concentrated thought and writing” (p. 48). In the experiences of their interviewees, such practices involved not only the moment of inscription itself, but also myriad other activities that allowed for the gestation of ideas. First, it represents a possible development in what Prior and Shipka (2003) refer to as “ environment-selecting and -structuring practices,” or ESSP’s, which they define as the “intentional deployment of external aids and actors to shape, stabilize, and direct consciousness in service of the task at hand” (p. 44).

The emergence of these tools matters in two ways. No menu bars, no buttons or ribbons, and some even disable system notifications.

WRITEMONKEY FOCUSWRITER FULL

Though there are differences among these applications, all seek to minimize potential distractions by going full screen and limiting the interface to a cursor and the words being produced.

According to a 2010 reader poll on the blog, some of the more popular distraction-free writing environments included FocusWriter, WriteMonkey, OmmWriter, Q10, and WriteRoom. But recent years have seen the emergence of a different approach to writing software, often referred to as “distraction-free writing tools” or “distraction-free writing environments.” These software applications eschew the kind of “feature bloat” seen in traditional word processors in favor of minimizing features and stripping down the interface to its bare essentials.

Writemonkey focuswriter