HACK ATTACK

Magazines are folding faster than you can check the “bill me later” box, newspapers are sending grizzled staffers out on the streets and book publishers are all trying to get into television. But the biggest threat to the wanna-be wordsmith may be the very screen and keyboard designed to make producing prose so easy. Just leaf through any software catalogue and check out all the new programs that seem designed to make the writer and editor obsolete.

Need an on-line reference? Browse the “Random House Encyclopedia--Electronic Edition,” the “American English Writing Guide,” Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” or the “Instant Library of Quotations.” Forgot how to spell diphthong? Check out the “American Heritage Dictionary,” “Inside Information,” or the “Big Thesaurus.” Can’t get your tenses straight? The market’s awash in editing programs, from “Grammatik” and “Sensible Grammar” to “RightWriter.” Even those afflicted with writer’s block can find salvation through “ThoughtPattern,” which permits you to feed your random thoughts and notes into a self-organizing database that does everything except regurgitate them into the finished document.

If that’s not structured enough, there are programs that map out how to write a screenplay, a novel, even a poem. As a last resort, there’s “Synchronicity,” a New Age “intuition support” program to “help you master questions of personal strategy.” But can a computer do Letterman?