Hullo scientists, fellow researcher here with a question for peers:
Do you have any suggestions for closed-off writing software (no AI scraping, no school oversight, no cloud storage with mysterious and unknown security). As we are all aware, formatting an article can take as much effort as writing the damn thing some days, especially if you do not want to use Microsoft or Google for ethical and privacy reasons.
My peers and I work with a lot of students who want to study and work with vulnerable populations, the sort of populations that some companies and (shameful) universities are attempting to delete evidence of. I am attempting to address some concerns coming up in the classroom without putting my career at risk. What better way than with a lesson and a resource list for secure writing and storage tips?
The school doesn't pay for a Microsoft license, and some students have expressed feeling unsafe and uncomfortable supporting google. I have suggested Libreoffice as its what I use but some of the students are really struggling with formatting their papers to academic standards in this software. Admittedly, I agree, Libre takes 7-14 steps to do some things google can do in two clicks. I would like to look into alternatives.
Most of the writing applications I'm seeing both free and paid tend to be for creative writers or note taking and I am not seeing tools to make running titles or easily format your sources.
What are you all using, do you have recommendations? I
wonderful! I will add this and your explanation to the list I am compiling. Students love trying new apps
Seconding LaTeX as the gold standard for formatting math/science in written form. Some of my peers in grad school (physics) wrote up their assignments in it (I opted instead for massive reams of handwritten work). However, I did write up my thesis in LaTeX. My university had a LaTeX template for a thesis that took care of the boilerplate formatting, I just had to focus on the content.
interesting, could you tell me a little more about this? I am on their webpage and they emphasize that they are not a word processor application. I am looking at this page on APA formatting examples and thinking that it could be very useful for my graduate classes but probably a bit above (terrify the shit out of) the sophomore class.
It seems to require some knowledge of script writing. I'll add it to the list because I'm sure a lot of folks will use it but I think that image alone would have some of my students going down to the office to switch majors XD
I teach my physics undergraduates the basics of latex for writing. They usually figure it out. It's basically like writing some code. The biggest pain are graphs. And like a lot of code these days, chatgpt can help a lot.
If you just need to write basic text formatted using apa, you could find or create a template and give it to your students. Then they won't even need to think about the formatting cause the template will deal with it all correctly.
Oh, i should add, in that screenshot, most of that code creates the fornatting. Once that is set, your actual content with words and paragraphs looks mostly like text.
Start with a minimal preamble and start testing it out.