I have been playing around with two products, WriteRoom and Dark Room, which allow users the ability to edit text in a completely isolated environment. Essentially, these editors give users the ability to focus on the text, and only the text. For the professional blogger/writer, one of these text editors might become invaluable to your writing process.

Some of you will find either of these applications to be worthy as your new primary text editor, but the rest of you will think they are far to primitive, but if you are the former, like one of my followers on Twitter, you will absolutely love the concept of being able to write without distraction.

Another user on Twitter messaged me stating that text editing tools were the last things that distracted him while writing. I find that the text editor I utilize happens to have a dramatic impact on how productive I am when writing. For example, I have a difficult time using web-based text editors (like the built-in WordPress editor), but I absolutely enjoy using an application like Windows Live Writer and ecto to write my articles.

These applications will probably generate no interest for quite a few of you, but I have already decided to incorporate WriteRoom into my workflow. It is a throwback that I absolutely love, and I am usually the one that loves the fancy interfaces.

WriteRoom

WriteRoom is the first product that was created (as Dark Room is simply a clone of WriteRoom). Built for the Mac operating system (now supporting OS X 10.4 or later), WriteRoom was designed to eliminate the common distractions that are apparent with most text editing environments today. The application eliminates formatting, graphs, spacing, pictures, and more by focusing on only the most important aspect of a writing—the words.

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With classic tact, Markus introduced new Performancing member David Lind to the concept of the text desert (not "dessert", like cake..."desert" like sand and camels). David, in an appropriate manner, responded with a "what the hell are you talking about Markus"? (Just as I would have had I not known what a text desert was).

Let me explain. A text desert is an article that consists of long, unbroken patches of textual content. Even if it's got great content, a text dessert often has negative psychological effects which cause many people to ignore, scoff, or have their eyes glaze over:

Some Negative (Health) Effects of of the Text Desert

• Text deserts are not easily scannable, making them unhealthy for the video gaming generation
• Text deserts overwhelm the reader and cannot be easily digested
• Text deserts don't have any interesting eye candy like children's books (or the NY Times)
• Text deserts make lazy people like me work harder
• Text deserts can cause the human eye to get watery...and itchy.

Five Tips for Avoiding the Text Desert

1. Use scannable headlines to describe and break-up sections of your article
2. Use bullet points (ordered or unordered depending on context) to make your points as quickly as possible
3. Write shorter paragraphs to make the reader feel less overwhelmed, and more accomplished (woohoo! I've finished 3 paragraphs already)
4. Emphasize important phrases with bold and italicized text
5. Emphasize your point with a picture

There you have it. Now if Markus tells me that this is a text desert, I'm going to shoot him;-)