Writing with Scrivener: A Hopeful Tale of Disappearing Tools, Flatulence, and Word Processing Redemption

• In a personal narrative, I explore the consequences of writing tool design.
• Ignoring discomforts of our writing tools is an important stage in tool adoption.
• Trying new writing tools can help us to identify problems with our standard tools.
• By identifying the discomforts of our tools, we can create better-fitting tools.
• Posthumanism explains the complexity of our relationship with writing tools.

There is no writing without technology. Although we are highly aware of writing's mediated nature when asked to learn new writing technologies either as individuals or as a society, we most often ignore these technologies, allowing them to disappear from our consciousness. Not paying attention to our tools can, however, have dangerous consequences. It becomes easy to forget the political, economic, and random forces that influence our choice of technology. Using personal narrative, I explore this tangled relationship between the disappearance of our tools, tool standardization, tool (dis)abilities, and tool design. I tell the story of my four-year-old son's journey to literacy and my discovery of a new type of writing software called Scrivener. Reading the story of Scrivener's development empowered me: I came to see myself as an active participant in the creation of my writing technologies, and I learned to identify when the discomforts of technology should not be ignored. I use these narratives to argue for a posthumanist view of our relationship with technology, a view in which boundaries between humans and technology are blurred, and I offer suggestions on how to adopt a posthumanist perspective toward writing tools in our composition classrooms.