Assignment 2 - Tricia Sallee

                For this assignment I chose Chapter 6 Writing with a Computer from Steven Krantz’s “A Primer of Mathematical Writing Being a Disquisition on Having Your Ideas Recorded, Typeset, Published, Read, and Appreciated.” This chapter interested me because I often feel that writing on a computer impairs my writing process and hinders many people from completing the correct amount of editing. Krantz agrees with this. He discusses how it is nice to be able to delete entire paragraphs, move them around, etc. but he still prints out his papers to edit the hard copy. This ensures that the spell checker isn’t the only editing used. Since spell checker will only find an error that is not a word it will not help if you should have said “allowed” and instead typed “aloud.” Krantz provides many more examples in the text.

                Krantz also discusses that computer writing is convenient because many versions of a paper can be kept with ease. The documents don’t take up much memory on a computer and can save thousands of pages in seconds. Keeping previous versions allows return to a certain phrase or paragraph that was used earlier without having to remember it word for word. However, computers are not perfect. The hard drives can crash and without having backups all the completed work would be lost. To prevent this loss Krantz recommends backing up documents on a regular basis. Most people back up to the cloud now. This is really just a hard drive somewhere else, but it is well maintained by many engineers, so it is much less likely to fail than the hard drive in our personal computers.

                Some professors have required mathematics homework to be typed. I have always struggled to make this look right. Part of the reason for this is that Word just doesn’t have all the equations and symbols in one location that are easy to navigate. This is discussed in Chapter 6. Krantz calls Word and other word processors “What you see is what you get.” This means that how things appear on screen is how they are printed out. There are many other programs that are better to write mathematics books with. They are not like Word. These use markup languages that easily describe how mathematical equations should look. When printed this language is translated and then prints textbook like equations. Some programs mentioned include Mathematica, Maple, Tex, etc. I am not familiar with any of these programs but I am excited to try them.