Do your writing online with no pop-ups or buttons to disturb you

Launch a web browser and go to Quietwrite's home page. When the page has loaded, it’s possible to dive in straight away by clicking the New button at the top right. However, to get the full benefit of Quietwrite, it’s best to sign up. This is free and only takes a moment. Click the Login button, then, at the next screen, click Sign Up and type in a valid email address and password. Click Sign Up again, and that’s it.

Quietwrite checks to see if any documents have been created yet using the supplied credentials. However, as this is a new account, it instead displays a message – ‘You have no writings yet. Why not create one?’. Click the link and after a moment a new empty document appears with room for a title and then text below it. Move the mouse pointer around and a selection of menu buttons appears at the top left (we’ll come to these in a moment). For now, just type some text into the provided spaces.

As soon as the mouse pointer stops moving and you start to type, everything disappears from the screen apart from the text. Compare what’s shown in this screenshot to a typical Microsoft Word window. Here there are no button bars, no menus, no pop-ups, nothing to distract the writer. As a way of helping you to concentrate and get the words down on the page, it’s very effective. Documents are also saved automatically, so there’s no need to be worried about losing anything, either.

It’s possible to keep documents private, but part of the point behind Quietwrite is to share what you’ve written with others. First though, let’s set up a profile by clicking the Your Profile button. At the next screen, click the Edit your name button, then click the Personal Info tab and type a name. Leave the other settings here as they are. This means that when a piece of writing is published and someone else sees it and comments, Quietwrite will automatically notify you via email.

Let’s publish something. Having created a piece of writing, make sure you’re on the main edit page where the text is and click the Publish button. After a moment, Quietwrite will display a new screen showing both the text and a unique web address that ‘points’ to the article. Click this once to highlight it, then right-click and choose Copy from the pop-up menu. Now it’s easy to paste the document’s address into an email and send it to a friend.

Alternatively, sit back and wait for other Quietwrite users to come to you. Visitors to the site can click the Explore button and they’ll see something similar to the screen shown here. The article we created in Step 2 is now listed on the front page under the JUST NOW heading and anyone who clicks it can open the document and read it. They can also comment and if they do, you’ll receive notification by email. Changed your mind? Open the document again and notice that Publish button has changed to Unpublish. Click it and your article will be removed from public view.