I've spent the day and much of the evening reading through the draft of a little book I'm co-authoring with a BBC Trust colleague about public value – what it is, how to do it, and what it all means. This is part of the deck-clearing needed before I write my own 'big' book on social welfare, and some of the research overlaps too. But tackling 40,000 words has just reminded me how hard it is to sustain an argument and get a structure right over 80-90,000  words. Probably the hardest thing I've done. It brought to mind a conversation at the LSE a few months ago about the impact of word processing on writing. One of the profs still preferred to write longhand first, but most of the rest of us couldn't imagine writing a book without the ability to restructure electronically. How has this changed our capacity to think and write, I wonder? Are we becoming less able to concentrate on making sustained arguments, just as we seem to be steadily less able to concentrate on reading long passages, our attention spans shortened by the phyical character of the screen? And are we also too prone to ignore things unavailable online when we research our books, as this delightful Chronicle article about historical research illustrates? On balance, I think the technology has improved writing even if it has harmed reading skills – more access to material, not less, overall, and more scope to hone and improve lines of argument. Others will no doubt disagree.

PS the public value book will be out in the autumn.