Today, I was considering how easy it is to make attractive and effective documents. Earlier, I was putting together questions for my course's midterm exam. I don't spend a lot of time in a word processor nowadays. I find this interesting as it was probably the primary way I spent my time when computers first came out in the 1980's. I suppose we were just happy to be able to fix corrections before they hit the paper in those days. It was the final goodbye to correction fluid and ribbons. The paper which slowly emerged from a noisy dot-matrix printer, although nothing to brag about by today's standards, still looked better than something typed on most manual typewriters.It wasn't long after learning key sequences for Wordstar, that we began to expect more. WordPerfect shipped with a ton of proprietary .WGM graphics to spruce up one's letters and memos. Nothing that ran under DOS was really WYSWYG at the time though.
Now, the average user can spit out something that looks quite impressive. Rather than relying on clip art, it's simple to paste directly from an Internet image search. I was thinking of this as I came across some old midterm tests where objects for writing a technical description were sketched and physically glued to the sheets before photocopying. Now I can instantly find a picture of almost anything. Say, I want to include a table lamp on a worksheet. I have nearly an unlimited selection at my fingertips.
Just in case any of my present students stop by here, I'll warn that a lamp is not an object on tomorrow's midterm examination!