wcaleb

Yes, and I think lowering the "stakes" of the paragraph is important. Sometimes switching to longhand on a legal pad helps me, because then I know that I'm not working on the final, final version, and I can allow the paragraph to be, temporarily at least, imperfect.

Recently I learned a good trick for turning of your internal editor while writing, which is one of the things discussed in the essay. Try turning the screen of your laptop off so that you can't see what you are typing, and just type away for a set period of time. This helps you "allow for error" and not worry over every word or phrase you are putting down. I can usually get hundreds of words out of this trick in just 20 minutes or so, after which you can turn the screen back on and have something to edit, revise, and polish.

Have looked at, but not really considered. I went down the Vim path pretty early on ...

Thanks! Important to note that writing my book in Markdown, and having to learn to use the command line for Pandoc, is what started me down the path to learning more programming.

Original author here. Yes, I'm mainly assuming my reader is a humanities person less familiar with LaTeX. Though there's increasing interest in Markdown and LaTeX among historians since I wrote this post. See, for example:

http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/sustainable-authorsh...

Original author here. Totally agree about version control. When I wrote that post I had not yet learned how to use Git. In a follow-up post I discuss how I now manage all of my notes and citations in plain-text on a Pandoc- and git-powered wiki called Gitit.

http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/plain-text-citations.html