Working on Painless Vim has been an education for me, and not just about vim. I’ve been working on developing a writing/editing loop that is more sustainable than NaNoWriMo’s joyous abandon, so that I’ll actually do some editing. While I enjoy working quickly and just getting things out there in front of people, there’s a problem with that model: not only am I terrible typist, I also write some terrible first drafts.

Anne Lamott would say that’s okay; and I agree with her. But the problem is that I’m also really bad at revising. Part of my problem is that I’m a very good speed reader, which really just means that I’m good at skimming over what I consider to be fluff and finding what I consider to be the point of the text in front of me. Good for getting through things quickly, bad for finding mistakes in my own text.

So I needed a way to force myself to slow down and actually look at the words. Not surprisingly it was Brett Terpstra that clued me into this simple little “one thing well” app. With Slicereader I just paste whatever chapter I’m working on into the app, and it converts all of my Markdown into nicely formatted text¹ and only shows me one paragraph at a time. Meaning I have to actually read that paragraph all by itself. Meaning I have to view it as a single entity, without resting on what came before or after it. Meaning I end up editing every paragraph instantly and repeatedly, reloading the text and seeing how my new changes stand up.

Slicereader is almost disturbingly focused on what it sets out to do: there are no fancy options to twiddle, no settings, no font pickers. You can choose daytime or nighttime mode. But when I need some help focusing on my editing, having all those choices taken from me is definitely a good thing.

And yes, I’ve run this article through Slicereader as well.

---