I don't use M$ Word (well, I did write my MA thesis with Word 5.1a, which I really liked back then). Good academic writing should be structured, and the writing process should involve focusing on the logical structure of what you're writing and on how your work relates to other work in the field; Word, with its emphasis on visual layout, doesn't really help you with any of these things.
Luckily, there are other writing tools that are more suitable for serious academic writing.
LaTeX
LaTeX is a free typesetting system that encourages structured writing and that was designed specifically with academic writing in mind. LaTeX runs on any operating system you can imagine (Mac, Linux/Unix, Windows, and many others), produces the most beautiful output you can ask for, and makes converting your files to PDF a trivial task.
LaTeX has built-in support for automatic numbering, cross-references, and bibliographies; and it can be extended with many packages specialized for linguistics, so tasks such as writing linguistic examples (with nicely-aligned glosses, numbering, etc), complex semantic expressions, syntactic trees, etc become very easy.
For more general information about LaTeX, see this introductory article; for information specific to linguistics, see LaTeX for linguists. Here is a listing of some LaTeX tutorials.
Since LaTeX files are just plain text files, you can use any text editor to write with LaTeX. My main LaTeX editor is Emacs with the AUCTeX and RefTeX packages; other excellent options that I've used on Linux are gedit with the LaTeX plugin, and Kile (Linux); an excellent editor that I've used under Mac OS X is TeXShop.
Other writing tools I use
LaTeX is an amazing tool for writing long or complex documents, and it is what I use for writing papers or handouts. For simpler tasks, it is sometimes easier to use something else:
- For writing drafts and outlines, I use Emacs org-mode; the main advantage is that org-mode is a great outliner, which makes it very easy to plan a paper in a top-down manner and to reorganize its structure as I write; other advantages include very easy editing of hierarchical lists, an incredibly easy to use table editing mode, and the ability to create links to other files. Org files can be exported to LaTeX (or to HTML), so I very often start writing with org and then at some point switch to LaTeX.
- LyX: When I want the power of LaTeX with the convenience of a "normal" word processor, I use LyX. Like LaTeX, this is also free software, and there are versions of it for Linux/Unix, Mac, and Windows. See also the page on using LyX for linguistics papers from the LyX wiki.
- LibreOffice/OpenOffice: LibreOffice is a 'normal' office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, etc), which is 100% free. It is compatible with MS Office (so this is what I use when somebody sends me a Word file), and is quite similar to it in many respects. One advantage of LibreOffice over MS Office (beyond the fact that it's free and not as annoying) is its ability to convert documents to high-quality PDF (with automatically-generated bookmarks that allow you to jump directly to any section of the document); you don't have to install any additional software to get this in LibreOffice.
- For collaborating with others on a document, I find using Google Docs to be much more convenient and productive than sending files back and forth by email; with Google Docs everyone always knows where to find the latest version, and you don't have to wait for someone else to finish his/her part before you can make changes.
Other options
Another good option for Mac users is Scrivener. It's hard to define what this program is – it can probably be described as an environment for managing a writing project. Unlike a word processor, a document in Scrivener is not just one large text, but is made up of any number of text "pieces", which can easily be (re)arranged hierarchically to reflect the structure of what you're writing. Each part of the document can have notes, annotations, links to external files and to other parts of the document, keywords, etc. When it comes to printing/publishing your documents, they can be exported to RTF, HTML, or LaTeX. Shareware, (See the Scrivener site for links to more writing software for Mac and for Windows).
Finally, if you insist on using MS Word, at least don't use it as if it was just a (very expensive) typewriter. Here are some guides on using Word, aimed at writing linguistics papers:
