[some-mthfka]

Good question. (Incidentally, it provides a good example for my words in the comment you have replied to.)

Words could be objects. But I will tell you more: you can start breaking words into characters and making them objects too, if you needed to. The key to performance here is to do the necessary stuff on the fly, on demand, dynamically. In other words, the word may become an object only when it needs to become a seperate entity. Suppose you use some data structure for storing sentences or paragraphs. Let's assume it's just a list. So, before a word needs to become an object that stores some information about itself, it can just be a string:

    '("This" " " "is" " " "a" "sentence" ".")

Now, if you wanted to tag the word "This" with some info (like stylization), you could turn that word into a more complex object:

    '(("This" :style bold) " " "is" " " "a" "sentence" ".")

In fact, if your application requires such an optimization, you could even store it as a simple string

    "This is a sentence."

You can choose whatever storage unit you like, as long as you can make your editor work with it. Structural approach allows specialization on the fly, you can just adapt to the granularity when you need it, since there's just full programmatic access.