You've been typing away on an essay in Microsoft Word when the whole thing crashes, and you lose all your work. You wail, gnash your teeth, yell at the CMC tech staff and then commiserate with everyone you know. Losing all your work is probably a positive development however, if you have some extra time. It forces you through a second iteration of your work, which should be clearer and sharper than your first because you are visiting the ideas for a second time. Losing all your work on paper though doesn't mean you lose it in your head, and you also probably have an outline or some other reference document to go on. The other option is to write all of your essays from the command line and use version control to save all of your drafts. It's much less prone to crashes than Word.

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