I was talking with NakedJen today and it occurred to me that she might not know about word wrapping. She was putting hard returns at the end of every line in Fargo. This meant that when she wanted to remove a few words, she had to manually rewrap the lines below. I showed how, if she just continued to type at the end of a line, the computer would do the wrapping for her. It was a revelation! She had been using computers 25 years without knowing they could do this.

When you think about it, it makes sense -- if you learned how to write on a typewriter it might never occur to you. That's how I learned to write, and the early Unix text editors I used couldn't wrap. But the first writing tool I developed on the Apple II did it automatically. I remember the code was hard to write esp on a low-power machine like the Apple II. But I've never even documented the feature it seemed so basic to me.

You might check with friends to be sure they know about word wrap. Be sure you know about it.