A Plain Defense For Plain Text Blog

Plain Text For Education

Plain text is a great tool for education. So why is that? Well for starters, plain text is just that; plain text. There are no special characters to get in the way, there are no fancy fonts to get in the way, no advertisements to get in the way and on and on. Plain text is well suited for educational purposes all due to its simplicity and ease of use.

For starters, as was mentioned so many times here on this blog, plain text can be viewed on any platform there is. You don't need any specialized software to view or edit plain text files, and plain text files are the most portable of all the file formats for documents there is. So you're probably wondering how on Earth can they be used for educational purposes?

Well that answer is of course quite simple. You see due to the fact that plain text files are as portable as they are means that they can be taken anywhere and read. All computer systems can read and edit plain text documents and that's what makes plain text so versatile. Not only this, but you can store far more plain text files on an SD card, or flash drive than you ever could word processed documents that have been created using proprietary file formatting schemes. And, if you do have word processing documents stored either on an SD card or flash drive, then you better hope that the computer on the other end where you're putting that SD card or flash drive also has the native program that created that file, or at least one like it that can view or edit that particular file format because if you don't have that native program or one that can handle that particular file format on the opposite end, then you're litterally screwed! Then that would mean that you would have to go online to convert the document into plain text just to be able to read it on that other computer.

You see, that's the beauty of plain text for education. On the other end you don't need any specialized software to handle plain text documents because all computers can do it without any need for specialized software. That my friend is what makes plain text so useful for educational purposes. It is simple, easy to handle and very portable.

For those who use screen readers, plain text works very well because the screen reader doesn't have to worry about trying to handle graphics and images on the screen. A matter of fact, all screen readers only handle textual information. They can't handle graphics unless those graphics are labeled and even at that, it is the labeled text that is read and not the image itself.

Also, when using a plain text editor and such, one can do a search for the text that they're searching for. So there is really no need for using complicated bloated word processing programs just to read textual information. A plain text editor or even a plain text viewer can fit the bill nicely.

In turn using plain text for education makes learning much easier and faster. due to the fact that you don't have to deal with bloated software or whether or not the computer that it is being read on even has that software. That's because all computers no matter what operating systems they use will have a way to view plain text based information without you having to install something else. So why try to fix what isn't broken?

And as was mentioned in this blog, plain text is future proof meaning that it can be read on any computer system no matter how advanced it may get whereas other file formats may be pushed aside and done away with to only be replaced by yet another fancier and more complicated file formatting scheme that will also end up being a total waste of time. Plain text just works no matter what you use it for, and for education, it is a dream come true due to the fact that it isn't demanding at all.

Not only this, but nobody actually owns plain text whereas Microsoft does own the Microsoft Word file formats that it creates and such. And you want to know something else? It has been known that viruses can be transported inside word documents.

So if you plain to use word processing documents for your education, you better hope that those documents are free from viruses especially those that are sent to you from other people. Plain text doesn't have this issue. Plain text is the most raw, simple form of writtten digital communication there is. It is more stable than any other document file format, and like was said earlier, it doesn't need any specialized software in order to view or edit it. It just works.

#education #plain text for education #portability #text files #word processing