Thinking with a Word Processor:

thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs ~Wittgenstein
performed by the hand, when we think by writing
by the mouth and the larynx, when we think by speaking

When Friedrich Nietzsche started to use a typewriter and sent some rhymes he produced on it to a friend, the latter - a composer - commented upon the robust language. "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom", the friend wrote; "with me at any rate this could happen; I do not deny that my 'thoughts' in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper."

text on the word processor's display is there to be updated - to be altered, revised

the writer "can begin anywhere in the text"

Michael Heim in his Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing: "The immediacy of formulation in digital writing is akin to the immediacy of speaking.."

Parmenides: it is all one to me where I begin, he said - "faithfully reproducing", Havelock says, "the plunge that the bard takes into [his] medium"

Maintaining coherence is a matter of comparing texts with each other, as well as of comparing one bit of a text with other bits of the same text.
I don't think I agree that word-processing involves less access to the whole than does handwriting (and therfore less coherence)... no. but sure:
publishers now learn to be prepared for novel types of authors' mistakes, generated by the use of word processors - like, for example, paragraphs having been moved in such a manner that the result is nonsensical or like the same paragraph repeatedly occurring, having been copied to more than one place in the text.

basic form of networking is e -mail, and it is fascinating to observe how closely the style of e-mail messages tends to resemble that of spoken language. false starts and incoherent sentences
the technical possibility of sending off an e-mail letter on the spot - read your mail and answer it - on the spur of the moment, just like in a conversation.

networking blurs individual authorship. cooperative writing is easy: co-authors can readily revise and complement each other's texts.
that vast prepublication phase of scientific inquiry in which ideas and findings are discussed informally with colleagues, presented more formally in seminars & conferences & symposia, and distributed still more widely in the form of preprints... now possible to do all this in new way that is more thorough and systematic in its distribution, potentially global in scale, and almost instantaneous in speed, but ... unprecedentedly interactive...⁽⁴²⁾ [nice, note the html sup tags there] Scholarly inquiry in this new medium, called "scholarly skywriting" by Harnad, "is likely to become a lot more participatory, though", adds Harnad, "perhaps also more depersonalized, with ideas propagating and permuting on the net in directions over which their originators would be unable (and indeed perhaps unwilling) to claim proprietorship."

hmm. concludes that word-processing leads to thinking with others more. well ~ networking does maybe. but in first place the doing undoing ease of wordprocessing is what stands out to me. alt backspace. UNDO! thinking is like magic, not constrained by materiality. wordprocessing makes this all the more apparent ~