I remember as a child listening to my father write various articles that he was writing for his work at the university. The click clack of the typewriter, the bottle of Tipp Ex and the endless supply of little index cards (all organised into attractive little plastic boxes), the letraset, these were all a part of the process. The working space needed for this covered my father's desk, and would often spread onto the floor into piles all around. My brother and I were forbidden to touch any of the piles of papers that dotted the office floor (where we sometimes liked to play) so as not to disorganise things.

Now, almost thirty years later, I am working on a book of my own. It's a coursebook for English language learners. I still manage to have piles of paper all around me, but gone are the days of patiently weaving a piece of paper onto the typewriter, setting up the margins and having the TippEx constantly at hand. Most of my work, no I'd say almost all of my work is in my laptop computer. The space required can in fact now be reduced to my knees under extreme circumstances.

Writing a coursebook is a long process, and involves several people. Aside from myself, the writer, there are at least two editors, somebody responsible for illustrations, another person responsible for picture research (the photos), and the designers. Not to mention the actors and sound technicians who have to record the audio material. I haven't finished the book yet, and there will be probably more people involved before the whole thing arrives finally on the bookshelves.

The purpose of this brief article is to describe some of the technology tools that I use in the initial creation of material.

The nuts and bolts of writing

The most obvious tool of course is the word processor. I am not that adventurous with my word processor, although I have found that with practice I can now do most things without needing to use a mouse. The shortcuts on a wordprocessor will be different according to what language you are using (for example, to make the text bold I type Control+B on my English word programme, but on a Spanish programme it's Control+N) but it's very useful to know them as it speeds things up immensely.

Finding shortcuts

Saving work is incredibly important when writing. I have had two or three sickening moments when I thought I had lost something. Even backups on CDROM make me nervous now, but I have found a wonderful Internet site to store things. It's called Yahoo Briefcase and if you are already a Yahoo mail user then you have it free. Basically it's a storage space - you can upload documents there and leave them. Then you can go and download them from the site into any computer, anywhere. I think I have draft versions of two books in my virtual briefcase, and always use it now as a backup.

Using Yahoo Briefcase

Topics and material

One of the most difficult things in writing material is to find an interesting text or angle on a topic. This is where the Internet becomes an extremely useful, even indispensable tool. It would be hard here to say which links are the best for finding ideas, it's really a question of what you're looking for. One site which is probably among the most popular, a good starting point, is the BBC website, www.bbc.co.uk, simply because you can find something on almost anything in there.

I also regularly consult the free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) for information about topics. It's really an extraordinary site. It has over a million entries (Britannica has 75000 entries). Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, and anyone can edit it. It's self-policing – meaning that offensive or inaccurate material tends to be removed very quickly. The only problem is that it is not authoritative and probably never will be. But the quantity of information is huge.  As a teacher, I have used the short texts from Wikipedia with students.

Another favourite website I use to get ideas or look for interesting data is NationMaster (www.nationmaster.com). It's a compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF and OECD. Unlike Wikipedia, this site is authoritative. Using a simple form, you can generate maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics, from number of English speakers to amount of beer consumed per capita to average age that people get married or have children.

Language work

Most dictionaries now come with a CDROM. This is an excellent addition to any writer's or teacher's computer. I have the Macmillan English Dictionary on CDROM. With this dictionary you can get not only definitions, but illustrations, pronunciation (British and American) and study sheets. I use it mostly to help me write definitions or find alternative ways of explaining words. The site www.answers.com is another dictionary resource I use online sometimes. On Answers.com you type in a word and the website will come up with definitions from other dictionaries.

I am currently writing material for lower level learners. Another author tipped me to a great site for measuring text difficulty, called Vocabulary Profiler (http://132.208.224.131/vp/). Vocabulary Profiler is a site created by Tom Cobb from the University of Quebec. What it does is "break texts down into frequency categories, as determined by the frequency of words in the language at large". I paste a text into the profiler, and it does the following:

1) tells me how many words the text has

2) tells me how many different words the text has

3) divides the words into first and second thousand most frequent words in English, academic words, and the remainder 'offlist.' 

If for example, over 80% of my text is in the top 1000 words, then there's a good chance it's not too difficult for the level I am writing for. If my text has only 50% of the top 1000 words in it, then it might be too difficult.

Corpus data is also useful. I find that my most common use of corpus data is to check a hunch I have about language. After a period of time unavailable, the Collins Cobuild site is finally back up and working. If you enter a word or combination of words into the search engine, the site will grind through the 56 million word corpus and give you examples of that language (in concordance lines, see example below). The Collins site also allows you to search for collocation, which is extremely useful too. The Collins Corpus sampler and Collocation finder is free at http://www.collins.co.uk/Corpus/CorpusSearch.aspx.

Here are example concordance lines for writing:

       storage. Ideal for card games or letter writing, it is sure to 

  A full list of winners will be obtainable by writing to Hush 

  the past, my friends could have won creative writing awards for 

        in his much vaunted work. Painting and writing is Alexander's 

  Carroll is one of the most arresting authors writing today, and 

    Guyana. [p] American man, hobbies reading, writing and movies. 

and opted for relative sanity as one half of a writing team with 

     I would also recommend people to read bad writing, or 

      as they listened attentively had Marvell writing an ode in his 

   and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the 

 painted in different colours. For a few weeks writing with a pencil 

    of what I have learned.' Joni's purpose in writing the book was 

     made to a social worker which recorded in writing and placed in 

         that means a whopping mistake in your writing is invisible 

    fiction completing the domination of genre writing. With the top 

s accident and emergency trainees association, writing in the British 

 AN obsessed fan faces up to 35 years jail for writing obscene 

And here are the five most common collocations the site gave me for the word "writing".

Conclusion

A friend of mine and I once had a conversation about whether or not we could still write without the use of our computers and the internet. We thought we probably could, but nowhere near as fast or easily. That has been the benefit of technology on the writing process, but also its curse. Editors and publishers now expect material much quicker. Deadlines are getting shorter and shorter, and the whole time process of producing something like a coursebook has probably been halved (or more) in the last ten years. And in this article I haven't even touched on material produced on the Internet. Maybe in thirty years time my son will be writing an article like this and saying "to think that my father made something that was printed on paper – how old fashioned"!

Lindsay Clandfield is a teacher, trainer and materials writer based in Spain. He is currently writing a coursebookfor Macmillan called Straightforward Elementary. He is a main author on the website Onestopenglish and does teacher training for Oxford TEFL Barcelona.