For students & researchers
Clarity for
complex study.
An argument has to be held still before it can be written down.
Minimal Writer is a focused writing app for students and researchers working on essays, papers and long academic arguments.
A chapter rarely fails because the sentences in it are poor. It fails somewhere between the reading and the writing — a source that no longer supports the claim it was filed under, a section that was sound in the outline and will not hold on the page. Most of the work of studying is the work of keeping a shape in mind long enough to get it down.
Software is unhelpful about this in a particular way: it is busy. A toolbar is a small, permanent argument for doing something other than thinking, and there are twenty of them on screen before you have written a word. Minimal Writer starts from the opposite end. There is almost nothing on the page, and the little there is concerns the shape of the work rather than the look of it.
One thought at a time
The hardest paragraph in a paper is usually the one where the argument turns. It needs the whole chapter in your head and the next clause under your hands at the same time, and it is exactly the paragraph a notification will cost you.
So the app lets you decide how much of the page stays lit. Dim everything but the paragraph you are in, or everything but the sentence, and the line you are working on rises to the middle of the screen and stays there while you write. Formatting stays under the keys: the notation you already use for a heading or a quotation is the notation that makes one, so the hands never leave the sentence to go looking for a menu.
Where the reading goes
A paper is built almost entirely out of things that are not the paper: a literature review, a set of interview notes, three objections you have not answered yet. Kept in a folder beside the chapter, they are somewhere to get lost. Kept in the chapter, they are in the way of it.
Here a document can hold other documents. The chapter stays the thing you open, with the reading nested inside it — close enough to reach, far enough to be quiet. Write one argument in isolation, then step back and read the whole paper as a single piece, and the outline beside it lets you take a section that has ended up in the wrong place and put it where it belongs, without cutting and pasting a thousand words to do it.
A toolbar is a small, permanent argument for doing something other than thinking.
Work that survives the term
Studying happens in library basements, on trains and in rooms with unreliable wifi, and none of that should be a reason to stop. Every keystroke is written to your own machine first and sent on when there is a connection to send it over, so a bad signal costs you a sync and never a sentence.
When the paper is finished it leaves as whatever the department asks for — a Word file, a PDF, or the plain text it was written in. Nothing is locked in here, least of all your own words. Which is also the short answer to the obvious question: what a page without a ribbon is for is the draft, and Word is where it goes afterwards.
Bring focus to your academic work.
Start writing for freeLast updated