If you use a Mac, that program is called TextEdit. You can find it in your Applications folder, under Utilities. If you use Windows, the program is called Wordpad, made, ironically, by Microsoft. If you poke around your Start menu among the various programs, it’s in there somewhere, depending which version of Windows you have.
Until I got Scrivener, I used TextEdit for pretty much all word processing, from little notes to myself up to epic research projects. Macs come with a program called Stickies expressly for the purpose of writing yourself little notes, which has the virtue of autosaving your every keystroke. But the little stickies aren’t congenial to serious word processing. Textedit is a better general-purpose scratchpad. (more…)
