Does using a word processor affect a writer's style? The medium usually does do something to the message after all, even if Marshall McLuhan's claim that the medium simply is the message has been heard and largely forgotten now. The question matters. Ray Hammond, in his excellent guide The Writer and the Word Processor (Coronet ￡2.95 pp224), predicts that over half of the professional writers in Britain and the USA will be using word processors by the end of 1995. The best-known recruit is Len Deighton, from as long ago as 1968, though most users have only started since the micro-computer boom began in 1980. Ironically word processing is in some ways psychologically more like writing in rough than typing, since it restores fluidity and provisionality to the text. The typist's dread of having to get out the Tippex, the scissors and paste, or of redoing the whole thing if he has any substantial second thoughts, can make him consistently choose the safer option in his sentences, or let something stand which he knows to be unsatisfactory or incomplete, out of weariness. In word processing the text is loosened up whilst still retaining the advantage of looking formally finished. This has, I think, two apparently contradictory effects. The initial writing can become excessively sloppy and careless, in the expectation that it will be corrected later. That crucial first inspiration is never easy to recapture though, and therefore, on the other hand, the writing can become over-deliberated, lacking in flow and spontaneity, since revision becomes a larger part of composition. However these are faults easier to detect in others than in oneself. For most writers, word processing quite rapidly comes to feel like the ideal method (and can always be a second step after drafting on paper if you prefer). Most of the writers interviewed by Hammond say it has improved their style. ('immensely', says Deighton). Seeing your own words on a screen helps you to feel cool and detached about them. Thus it is not just by freeing you from the labour of mechanical re-typing that a word processor can help you to write. One author (Terence Feely) claims it has increased his output by 400%. Possibly the feeling of having a reactive machine, which appears to do things, rather than just have things done with it, accounts for this — your slave works hard and so do you. Are there no drawbacks? It costs a lot and takes time to learn — 'expect to lose weeks of work', says Hammond, though days might be nearer the mark. Notoriously it is possible to lose work altogether on a word processor, and this happens to everybody at least once. The awareness that what you have written no longer exists at all anywhere, is unbelievably enraging and baffling. According to the first paragraph of the passage, what is the obvious change for professional writers in Britain and the USA?