Mediational Means

When Maid talks about helping students find the right tool for the task, he echoes a common frame for understanding tool selection. However, such advice becomes more ambiguous when one attempts to define the criteria for determining what makes a tool "right." Should aesthetic qualities of the interface count? What about the number of steps it takes to accomplish the task? The number of devices on which the software can be used (e.g., laptop, phone, tablet)? In some teaching situations, we can artificially determine the task in such a way that the "right" tool becomes clear—the one that meets our teaching goals. But writers like Sparks and others in this affinity space have a variety of goals they are trying to meet. There is the obvious overarching goal of finishing writing projects. But there are many other goals as well.

For example, in our interview Sparks described several goals associated with his cooking ideas workflow. First he described the importance of syncing text across Macs, iPhone, and iPad: "I want to put it in something that makes it very flexible for me to move the text back and forth." Next he described a brainstorming/incubation goal: recording ideas in a mindmap over several weeks. He then described a goal related to improvement: "I'm a nerd, so I'm always looking for something more effective." Later he described a goal for the mindmapping process: "quick capture" of fleeting ideas into a mindmap while on the go (e.g., while "eating a taco"). Once he's moved on from mindmapping to composing the text itself, he wants tools that "get out of the way. . . . I just want the words to show up." More broadly, Sparks suggested that a goal is to continue experimenting and tinkering with apps and workflows in order to write about it for his MacSparky business: "And frankly, I write about this stuff, so, you know, I am at the sharp end of the stick on some of this stuff, admittedly."

Trying to find the right tool for the task becomes more complicated when we recognize that there are varying goals the "right tool" must address. The concept of mediational means offers a useful frame for understanding how Sparks's (and all writers') broader goals shape tool selection and use and are subsequently shaped by the tools and their use over time. Jody Shipka (2011) argues that James Wertsch's framework of mediated action is well suited for "tracing the situated and highly distributed processes by which texts are created, circulated, and consumed" (44). Drawing from the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and others, Werstch (1998) examines "mediated action" in order to avoid becoming "too narrowly focused on the agent in isolation" by "recogniz[ing] the role played by 'mediational means' or 'cultural tools' in human action" (17). When we focus too narrowly on Sparks's broad goals as a writer to the extent that we ignore his tools, seeing them as interchangeable or superfluous to the "real" task of writing, we are likely to miss the ways these tools inherently situate the activity "culturally, institutionally, and historically" (24).

Wertsch's discussion of mediated action clarifies much of the above discussion about goals and tools. He argues that "mediated action typically serves multiple purposes" and that these purposes "are often in conflict" and that therefore "in most cases mediated action cannot be adequately interpreted if we assume it is organized around a single, neatly identifiable goal" (32). As in the case of Sparks's writing processes, Wertsch notes that people may have immediate goals (his example is of an Olympian attempting to clear a pole in a pole vaulting competition) but also broader goals (such as "impressing a particular audience" or "irrational hatred of an opponent" [33]). Furthermore, goals may not even be solely associated with the individual and their thinking processes. Wertsch suggests:

For example, if we ask whether pole vaulting should be considered an Olympic sport or why competition and pride in individual accomplishment operate so powerfully in this context, we are dealing with goals whose circumferences extend beyond those concerned with individual efforts to get over a cross bar, and we are touching on issues that cannot be reduced to mental processes in the individual. (33)

Similarly, issues of productivity, efficiency, and quality are at play in Sparks's workflow that extend beyond his own individual thoughts and intentions. Why does he want to be able to brainstorm ideas over several weeks while eating a taco or in other small moments? Because this work, he believes, makes his composing more efficient and more thoughtful later on. He may internalize and appropriate these goals to some extent, but goals related to productivity and efficiency are also operating (and probably originating) outside of his individual cognition.

In some contexts, these goals may seem in tension or even in conflict. Perhaps the most useful tool has an unappealing interface or comes with trade-offs (e.g., it provides useful textual organization tools but doesn't have an iPad version). Wertsch explains that mediational means, as cultural tools, have goals "built into" them and that these goals may conflict with the "goals of the agent" (33). In Bruno Latour's (1999) terms, we can identify this process as "translation" and note the drift between one's original goal (use a variety of devices to write in multiple contexts and environments) and one's final goal (write with one application on multiple devices but revise with another application only on the desktop computer), seeing how it was initiated by the addition of a new tool (the software) with its own (embedded) goals (88–89). In this way, a writer's goal of seamlessly switching between many devices may encounter a short detour as she realizes that a new tool offers new possibilities but brings new requirements that may require new practices and workflows (e.g., brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and revising in separate applications limited to particular devices).

As Latour's concept of "translation" suggests, mediational means can push and pull people as they try to accomplish their goals. Drawing from Wertsch, Jody Shipka (2011) explains that "an action is simultaneously enabled and constrained by the mediational means or cultural tools employed" (46). For example, a writer may rearrange printed paragraphs on a table (see Roozen & Erickson 2017) to gain a global view of the text, yet when working this way the ability to edit is constrained (in contrast with rearranging with a word processor). Where Latour speaks of "detours" and "translation," Ron Scollon (2001) highlights Wertsch's characterization of mediational means as "partial," suggesting that a "mediational means never fits the action exactly. Only some of the characteristics may be called upon in any specific action" (121). During the paragraph arrangement exercise, the paper's flammable affordances aren't desired or used, for example. Scollon continues: "A mediational means affords some actions but this lack of exact fit to concrete actions means the mediational means also limits and focuses that action. Thus the mediational means is transformative of actions that are taken, by both doing and saying more and less than is intended by the users" (121). This aspect of "saying more" than a person might want could be illustrated by a new possibility afforded by the paper paragraphs: simply crumpling up the paper in a fit of frustration. This aspect of mediational means seems to particularly occur at the forefront with software tools, where so many features are often available that users can become overwhelmed with the possibilities beyond what they may have intended for any particular action.

Given this situation, Jody Shipka suggests, "It may prove helpful to think about the various ways individuals work with, as well as against, the agency of mediational means" (46). In most of the examples provided so far from Sparks's experience, he is primarily empowered by the mediational means involved in his writing activities. However, he did describe how word processors got in his way and worked against what he was trying to do:

Well, I mean before I was doing the usual drill in Microsoft Word, or whatever the word processor of the day was—MacWrite at one point, and, you know, different word processors, where I would sit down and just start writing it there, which just never was right for me, because I would get distracted by all the bells and whistles. And frankly those word processors aren't really a very good place to focus on your words. They're page layout tools. That's the thing. People don't realize it, but word processors really—they're not about words, they're about page layout.

You look at Microsoft Word, it's like getting in the cockpit of an F16. It's like, I just want to write a letter, and there's seventeen switches and two hundred buttons and font choices, and I just want to write a letter. It completely gets in the way of what you're there to do.

It is, in part, this experience of working against the agency of Microsoft Word and its complications that led Sparks to consider alternative applications and the writing workflows they afford.

Wertsch and others focused on mediated action emphasize how mediational means are used in the immediate moment to accomplish a task and are shaped by a history of prior uses of similar and different mediational means for a variety of tasks in many different situations. Sparks's cooking ideas workflow is mediated in the moment by certain mindmapping applications and the devices he uses and by his rich history of writing, incubation, and invention using many different mediational means. His use of writing applications that provide a global view of structure (e.g., Scrivener) and more minimal interfaces (e.g., Byword and Ulysses) are shaped by his past use and rejection of Microsoft Word for composing.

Furthermore, mediational means bring with them a history prior to their use and appropriation by any one person. In other words, it's not just Sparks's own previous use of Word, Scrivener, and Byword shaping his current writing activity but also the histories of those mediational means in the world at large. Scollon (2001) explains:

A mediational means is simultaneously linked to a history in the world as an economic, political, social, and cultural entity—coffee is part of a world-wide political economy—and to a history for each person who has appropriated it. This might be my first cup of coffee or it might be something I have daily at this time. Because mediational means embed a history both in society and in the habitus of a person, mediational means inevitably embed the power and authority structures of society. (120)

It seems likely that it is not only the buttons themselves on Microsoft Word's interface that Sparks and others interested in the category of applications now called "distraction-free writing environments" (see Van Ittersum & Ching 2013) find so distracting. It is the formatting features they afford, which bring along writing processes aimed at a finished product, at drafting and polishing simultaneously. Furthermore, the application itself is freighted with its associations with corporations, standardized review procedures, and enterprise software development. These associations stand in stark contrast to the independent (and often solo) developers of most distraction-free apps and their much smaller user bases.

These scholars show the wide-ranging ways that mediational means shape people's activity in mediated action such that their mental habits develop around them, and if the activity is performed routinely, even their bodies change in response to how the tools are used (sometimes leading to injury) (Owens & Van Ittersum 2013). Because a person's performance relies so heavily on their use of mediational means, developing more expertise in any given activity is closely tied to their development of skill with specific tools. When learning a new activity, much of the process involves gaining skill with the mediational means (be they mental or physical). For example, a student learning to write recommendation reports is largely gaining skill with the genre as a mediational means. However, improving skills with a particular mediational means may not always yield the best results. Wertsch (1998) explains:

A change in cultural tools may often be a more powerful force of development than the enhancement of individuals' skills. The irreducible tension between cultural tool and agent that defines mediated action means that, when considering how to enhance or change a course of development, the key may often be to change the cultural tool rather than the skills for using that tool. (38)

It could be, perhaps, that the student has been developing skill with the "research paper" genre learned in school, and trying to fit that into the requirements of the task, when using the new genre of "recommendation report" would produce a better outcome more quickly.

When applied to writing technologies, this assertion could quickly lead to superficial solutions, like replacing Microsoft Word with Google Docs and expecting leaps in student writing quality. To avoid such simplistic approaches, we need to understand what, exactly, a mediational means consists of as separate from any given object that may be employed as a mediational means.

Scollon argues that "in general, mediational means predate the user" (116), in that people don't create a cultural tool out of nothing, but that they appropriate one with a history of previous use by others within situated contexts. Scollon then differentiates between "appropriation" and "use," where appropriation is "development of a mediational means over time within the habitus as an aspect of practice" (116) whereas "use" "calls upon the unique, irreversible, and concrete object as used in real-time action" (116). The distinction between "appropriation" and "use" is mirrored by a distinction between "mediational means and object, the first of these referring ultimately to a class of objects and the disposition for their use within the habitus, and the second referring to the concrete objects with which a specific act is performed" (116). The difference between mediational means and object is a crucial one for our understanding of writing workflows. This difference has two main consequences that Scollon describes:

In the first place virtually any mediational means may be used for a wide variety of functions outside of their inherent or normative use. In the second place other objects with those same functions may be substituted within any particular action as that mediational means. The result is the fundamental multifunctionality and polysemy of any mediational means which can be instantiated with a rather wide range of material objects in any particular instance of social action. (128)

An example of the first point is that an ink pen can be used for "normative use," such as to write an essay or a grocery list or draw a picture. But it could also be used as a sharp weapon. Or several pens could be stacked together to create a model of a cabin. This point is linked to the characteristic of mediational means as "partial," the way they exceed any particular use to which they may be put.

An example of the second point is that one may swap a pencil for the pen and engage in the same form of mediated action while writing a grocery list. The mediational means for that social practice has remained the same (writing instrument) while the object has been swapped (pen/pencil). For other practices, though, such a swap may not be so seamless. Using a pen or pencil in drawing a doodle is likely no big change, but in sketching a portrait using shading and other techniques, the affordances of a pencil versus a pen lead to quite different drawing techniques. Further, if one were to swap a tablet stylus and tablet for pen and paper, the activity may start out similarly, with shading techniques following a similar path, but diverge as affordances of the tablet and software lead to drawing with layers, manipulating shapes computationally, and so forth. Switching from pen and paper to stylus and tablet illustrates Wertsch's claim that new mediational means create "a kind of imbalance in the systemic organization of mediated action, an imbalance that sets off changes in other elements such as the agent and changes in mediated action in general. Indeed, in some cases an entirely new form of mediated action appears" (43).

So we have two interesting lines through which development takes place: introducing new mediational means and appropriating the same mediational means over time. As Scollon explains, repeated use of particular objects as mediational means over time leads to more complex appropriation of that mediational means: "Each use elaborates and complicates the structure of the mediational means and the habitus and therefore each use opens up the potential for more complex uses of objects as that mediational means" (135). We can swap the stylus for the pen, but we can also use the stylus many times over a week and learn to do more with it. This choice is precisely what workflow thinking is all about: being reflective about development and the possible paths one may take by swapping tools and learning more of the affordances of familiar tools.

Shaping mind

As seen above, Sparks works with multiple goals as he engages with his cooking ideas workflow. He is drafting a mindmap to serve as an outline, he wants "quick capture" of ideas, and he may sometimes want to experiment with a new application or an updated application in order to write or speak about it as "MacSparky." He achieves these goals by using mediational means that he appropriates over time. These mediational means function as classes of objects, not specific objects. This indicates that the mediational means Sparks appropriates could be identified as an "iOS mindmapping app" and that different applications (e.g., MindNode or iThoughtsHD) could be used. Or, as described above, he might experiment with a new drafting app, swapping Ulysses for Scrivener. If substituted apps can meet the same features that have been appropriated as mediational means, then these alternate objects can function as those mediational means in Sparks's workflow. In terms of mindmapping, as long as the application allows for quick capture and will export to the OPML file format or as a Markdown-formatted outline, Sparks can use it similarly. In this way, different applications can be used to achieve similar goals.

If different objects can function as the same mediational means, it may be tempting to conclude that particular applications do not matter much and that they can be judged merely based on their feature set. We see this conclusion as flawed for two reasons: First, because software rarely offers the exact same features and affordances and as these objects are appropriated over time, they may develop into new mediational means or lead to new kinds of mediated activity (as described in the previous section). Second, judgments about software features rarely cover aspects that relate to how the app "feels" when using it, how it supports one's desired mental states for working.

Wertsch and Paul Prior both address these affective evaluations of tools in their discussions of mediated activity. Wertsch (1998) described an Olympic pole vaulter who disliked using fiberglass poles because the spring of the poles was too much like a "circus trick" to him and made him feel "ridiculous" (44). Prior (1998) discusses people's dispositions toward tools:

Central to appropriation is a person’s affective and evaluative orientation to a tool: Tools may be encountered, partially appropriated, and then rejected. In other words, people develop varied dispositions toward and senses of ownership over the psychological tools they encounter and (to some degree) appropriate. (181)

Running throughout MacSparky.com, the Mac Power Users, and many other blogs and podcasts by other people in this affinity space are accounts of individuals' aesthetic and affective responses to software.² These accounts often focus on the interface, such as whether it is "ugly as sin" or "attractive" with "great typography and color choices." They also frequently use figurative language related to comfort and ease, such as referring to using an app by saying it "feels like slipping under a warm blanket on a cold night."

Basing evaluations of software interface design and function on affective responses may seem like a luxury or privilege, as many writers must simply use what is required by their employer or what is provided for free by the operating system. For writers in technical and specialized jobs who must use custom software, their choices are limited. However, even in these cases, writers' appropriation of their tools is shaped by their dispositions toward it, whether they experience frequent annoyance from unintuitive navigation of text fields or appreciate the lack of clutter on the screen. As for cost, every writing application in this space is priced for individuals and is significantly less costly than the annual subscription to Microsoft Office, and many have student or educational discounts. Writers who cannot buy software are left out of some of these deliberations between artisanal interfaces, yet again, the more general point about the role of affective responses to software in appropriation remains relevant.

These affective responses to software matter because writers use writing software to direct their activity, therefore their dispositions toward how that activity plays out shapes their motives, their evaluations of it, and their performance itself. Prior and Shipka (2003) describe writers as engaging in "environment-selecting and -structuring practices (ESSP’s), the intentional deployment of external aids and actors to shape, stabilize, and direct consciousness in service of the task at hand" (219). Thinking through Sparks's cooking ideas workflow via ESSPs can provide a concrete example of what is at stake with this perspective. First, in attending to the agency of actors, as discussed in the previous section, the mediational means Sparks uses for this workflow push and pull him toward various ends and ways of working. Scrivener or Ulysses, in presenting the full project as a hierarchically organized set of text chunks, encourage Sparks to consider the global structure of the text and make it simple to rearrange sections, thus perhaps subtly persuading him to do so.

Second, looking at ESSPs as supporting "the production of environments" (228), we include digital environments along with physical ones, and in the case of Sparks and others who are working with mobile computing technologies, these overlap in important ways (see Pigg 2014). Returning to the "quick capture" aspect, Sparks wants to be able to record ideas when he is in any physical environment, even one that makes writing challenging, such as when "eating a taco." In this case the digital environment for mindmapping must by synced accurately with the latest version of the mindmap that may have been edited previously on a computer or iPad and now will be added to via his iPhone. Its interface must quickly and efficiently support adding a new bit of text or "branch" to the map. For large maps, it must also support easy panning, zooming, and navigation, doubly so on iPhone screens as opposed to tablets or computer monitors.

Third, we turn to how ESSPs support writers in their efforts to "shape, stabilize, and direct consciousness in service of the task at hand" (219). One way to illustrate this aspect is through Sparks's composing practices, which came as a surprise to us. We had known Sparks before our interview as an advocate for applications with distraction-free interfaces (e.g., Byword), but it turns out we had not entirely predicted how he related to those interfaces.

One aspect of distraction-free interfaces is the simple graphical interface, which does away with the palettes or ribbons of interface buttons common on Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Further, such interfaces display text with minimal formatting, allowing for only one font, font size, and color. But for Sparks, "distraction-free" also has come to mean an application that "is going to get out of the way." He refers to an iOS text editor called Editorial that offers essentially an integrated programming environment powered by the scripting language Python, an application that allows users to create or import what it calls "workflows." Sparks says the application is "massively nerdy":

You can create specific workflows inside the application, you can actually create mini programs to make the application do more than that, and there's a lot I like about it, but the fact is I don't use it that much. I use something like Byword or Ulysses, where it really is just a place to write words. I mean, I don't want to have to get in there and do more with the application. I just want the words to show up, and I want them to appear on my other devices when I get there. So I almost am looking for something sort of basic to do this with.

Given Sparks's interest in automation and tinkering with tools that provide similar features as Editorial's "workflows" (Sparks often writes on his blog about Applescripts or Automator actions for Macs, and he has produced a tutorial video for the iOS automation app called Workflow), it initially struck us as surprising that he didn't use Editorial more with a suite of custom workflows for his legal or technical writing. For Sparks, however, the kind of writing he does with the cooking ideas workflow does not involve this kind of automation, especially in the drafting stage. There may be automations or scripts used during revision, proofreading, or production activities, but Sparks didn't mention these in our interview nor in blog posts or podcasts, leading us to presume that he doesn't see cooking ideas as extending there.

One explanation we could offer for Sparks's preference for writing applications with distraction-free interfaces and minimal features would be that Sparks sees different workflows and their activities as supported by different mental states. During our interview (and during his podcast discussion of cooking ideas), Sparks explained his preference for working as he does with the reason that this is how his "brain is wired":

The way my brain is wired, I'm not very good at just sitting down and starting a big writing project. It just never goes well. Instead I will start it weeks in advance, where I will open an outline or a mindmap, and then I will go spend little spurts of time in there over the next couple weeks, even though I know I'm not going to start writing for two weeks; the map will begin quite early. And it's just been my belief that my subconscious mind does a better job of kinda sorting out how I want to put it all together. And so with a limited amount of active time on it every day, but probably the thing kind of percolating in the back of my head all day, I usually come up with a pretty thorough outline by the time I'm gonna start writing the text. And once I get to that point, I export the mindmap or the outline just as simple text into a text file. And then I just start, you know, putting meat on the bones, for lack of a better word. And I keep the thing in text. I don't think about what the typography is gonna be or what the headings are going to look like or any of that stuff until the very end. And I spend the vast amount of my time writing whatever it is I'm writing into that text. And it just makes it really easy for me, because I can edit it on my phone, my iPad, or my Mac. And the only thing, my only job at that point, is the words. It's not any of the other layout stuff. And once again, just because, you know, the way my brain is wired, that actually makes things a lot easier. So I go and I write the text. And sometimes I get it done very quickly, and sometimes it takes a long time. [laughs] You know, just like anybody else, I guess. And I write projects of varying length. I've written hundred-thousand-word books, and I've written thousand-word articles and everything in between. So that obviously plays a role in it as well. (emphasis added)

While the sociocultural theory Prior and Shipka draw on might disagree with Sparks's characterization of his brain as stably "wired" in any certain way, his account exemplifies the aspect of "tuning consciousness" (228) via ESSPs. As Prior and Shipka describe it, these ESSPs "regulate thought and affect [and] channel attention and action" (228). Distraction-free software tools support the mental states Sparks understands as necessary or desired for drafting legal work or technical guides. We can even go further and suggest that ESSPs and consciousness shape each other through time in a way similar to how different events, mediational means, physical environments, tasks, and goals reshape activity. Rather than seeing consciousness as the stable agent guiding and directing activity toward the achievement of ends, we can see consciousness as produced through rich engagement with multiple and even competing goals; individual (or collaborative in other cases) selection, arrangement, and deployment of prefabricated mediational means; and lamination of roles and previous chronotopes such that no workflow is ever really fully separate. In other words, consciousness is not a stable thing that precedes any particular workflow but instead is made and remade through ESSPs, through setting up and engaging in workflows that produce states of consciousness. Workflow thinking, therefore—meaning deliberate attention to the ways tasks and tools can be fit together and reshape each other—is about understanding what states of consciousness are needed or desired and what workflows will reliably produce them. Neglecting this reflective work results in achieving desired states through chance or while being resisted by one's tools.

The Limits of Tools and Workflows

Sparks typically restricts his evaluation of the usefulness of the software to his own case, his own needs for his writing tasks. But sometimes on the podcast, and when asked directly, he will generalize and say that the writing software he uses will help people do better work.

Derek: What do you think these things—are there specific things you could point to that they improve people's—ways they improve people's writing?

David: Well, it improves your focus on your words. And there's only one thing that can do, is make it better. If you—and I guess I'm looking at it from a whole bunch of vantage points. I mean when you have a fluid organization like something like Ulysses or Scrivener gives you, it allows you to be constantly questioning the big picture about how the words should be organized or the sections should be organized. When you have a system that allows you to plan and organize your writing before you start writing the text, I think it helps you make a better product. And, frankly, when you have a system that refuses to let you fiddle with fonts and headings when you're trying to write the words, the focus on the words is going to make the words better. . . . I mean, it's just my opinion, honestly. I'm sure there's people who are much better writers than I that open up Microsoft Word and they make brilliant stuff, but I think if given everything else equal, if you get somebody on a system like this, I think that they can do a better job of writing some good text. (emphasis added)

Through regulating thought and channeling attention (Prior & Shipka 2003) the workflow and the tools used support the writer in doing better work. The cooking ideas workflows encourage engaging in invention activities that people may be inclined to put off or ignore out of expediency or procrastination. As is frequently said in this affinity space, "your mileage may vary," meaning that not everyone will find these workflows to lead to the same results. But Sparks, extrapolating from his experiences, sees significant value in being systematic about invention and concentration and using particular tools to achieve this.

Yet, as many in our field worry, sometimes tools do get in the way of good writing. They can distract us (as distraction-free software suggests), or they can require more time or attention that doesn't feed back into writing activity. As described above, Sparks doesn't use text editors that include automation and scripting features, because he prefers minimal environments that focus his attention on generating text. As he suggests later in the interview:

So scripting is super useful for a lot of types of writing, like, you know, emails and repeated things like in legal cases. . . . So I have a use for that, but for the real writing I do, whether it's an article I do for the website or a legal brief or a book or whatever, that automation stuff doesn't really do much good for me. It helps in the editorial process—sometimes I'll find I'm using a term incorrectly, or I need to go through and search and replace and do some things like that—but I don't know that those tools are all that useful when you're really doing the hard business of writing. To me it's like the technology got so advanced that it was getting in the way of people making good stuff. (emphasis added)

Here Sparks makes an interesting distinction between “the hard business of writing” and other tasks connected to literate activity. The "hard business of writing" requires a certain mind-set and therefore a certain workflow consisting of ESSPs that involve particular mediational means, physical environments, and timescales. Editorial work requires another mind-set (we might characterize it as careful efficiency) supported by a different workflow, one involving automated scripts that quickly catch common errors or change each term to another term without missing one (as one might do if searching and replacing manually).

Our participants in the study recognize as well that distractions tend to be idiosyncratic and may shift over time. Another participant in the study, Brett Terpstra (whose blog linking workflow is discussed in the next chapter), also talks about the hard business of writing and how applications can get in the way, although for him the distractions are different.

I spend more time exploring features than writing when I use Scrivener, and I think I find something new every time I use it—and that is friction. For a personality like mine, that is a death knell for actually getting any writing done.

I love people like the developer of Scrivener. . . . I love seeing the way their brains work and the features that they add—it's just, it's like going to the zoo for me. It's like looking in at all the animals. Not the people, but the features themselves are like zoo animals, and I just want to walk around and see them all.

One key distinction between Sparks and Terpstra is their approach to managing writing workflows. Sparks suggests that once a workflow is assembled, he just writes without any more tinkering until the project is finished:

I do tinker with picking the software tools and figuring out the workflow, because that's kind of my thing, but when I get into the writing, that's what I do. I write. And I write in Byword or I write in Ulysses or whatever app I've chosen to carry this project. It's just about the words.

Terpstra, on the other hand, maintains a tinkering mind-set throughout a writing task.

I tinker a lot. I'm constantly looking for a better way to do things even if that means putting two hours into solving what should've been a fifteen-minute task. But the next time I do it, it'll be instant. So as I run into any friction as I'm writing, I go build a tool to fix that friction. That's why a blog post that should've been a five-minute just-write-it-out often ends up being three to four hours of making it work. But, yeah, it changes anytime something seems like it could be better. I don't like the feeling of working around an issue instead of fixing it, at least not when it comes to like my own writing workflows.

Whether these are personality traits reflected in working habits, conscious decisions made by discriminating entrepreneurs, or some mix between the two is beyond our ability to analyze. Sparks has clear motives for writing—selling books, producing legal writing for his law practice, and writing blog posts to stay current with his audience. Terpstra has clear motives for searching out friction in workflows, since these searches may result in new projects to share on his blog or software applications to sell. While we are not looking to hold up either participant as a role model for writing scholars, teachers, or students, their separate approaches both have some value for writers to consider. Sparks's approach makes straightforward sense—spend some time and effort developing a few writing workflows, and then leave them alone until the project is completed. Yet we are reluctant to critique Terpstra's approach, as writers who might adopt it, in their sensitivity to some bit of friction in their writing workflow, could help to develop some new writing technology that could be valuable for themselves and others.

Giving deliberate attention to workflows, engaging in workflow thinking, we argue, can help mitigate the risks that the tools will get in the way or will become distracting in and of themselves. We see a crucial distinction between tinkering and workflow thinking—namely, the orientation toward goals. Brian Eno's discussion of his nightly experiments, quoted earlier, points to the value of making space for tinkering, for more goalless explorations. But he also described tinkering in the context of saving it for the evenings and being more production-oriented in the mornings. Workflow thinking orients writers toward maintaining focus on specific goals (e.g., write a book, create a first draft, write for two hours today) and reevaluating tools based on their ability to help accomplish these goals. Different individuals at different times need to find their own balance between workflow thinking and tinkering.

At this point, it may seem like just finding and learning one tool that basically supports one's writing well would be the most efficient and effective path forward. Perhaps it's worth reconsidering the arguments about the limits of word processors that this project began with and covered in chapter 1. Sparks echoes these arguments clearly:

I think that I'm definitely an outlier. I think most people in the world are just gonna open up Microsoft Word and start writing whatever they're writing. But my argument would be they could do a better job of it if they use some of these modern tools and kind of backed out the WYSI [What You See Is . . . What You Get] features, at least for the writing part. I do think that it makes your writing better.

Given the preceding discussion about ESSPs, however, we prefer to generalize beyond admonishments of Microsoft Word or even word processors as a class of software. What Sparks and many other proponents of distraction-free applications or Markdown syntax are pointing toward is the importance of workflows that "regulate thought and affect [and] channel attention and action" (Prior & Shipka 2003, 228). They are pointing to workflows that produce (and are produced by) mental states that support writers in whatever activity they seek to accomplish. For these writers, designing a workflow means crafting a digital environment responsive to physical conditions that supports and helps bring about concentration, focus, creativity, and many other states. Any tour through writing advice from the past one hundred years or so will cover some of the same ground: writers who have morning rituals, who use particular (physical) tools, who depend on specific brands of notebooks for incubation and invention. What we want to point to with these case studies is, first, the benefit of attending more carefully to the role of digital tools and environments and, second, the inseparability of these workflows for writing activity. Workflows aren't activities that simply precede writing, make writing easier, or make it more enjoyable. Workflows may involve those aspects, but we are suggesting something broader and more foundational: workflows, as we define them here, are what writing activity is made of.