I'd strongly suggest you skip the Word step. Maybe you'd be happier using something like nano (*nix's equivalent of notepad) instead of vi, unless you are comfortable using vi.

A good learning technique is to add very small amounts of code at a time and run the code to check it does what you expect. Although you have yet another tool to learn, learning to use the debugger even just a little bit can help a lot in understanding what your code is doing. There are many other debugging techniques than just using the debugger, but in my view a good debugger gives much better direct information about what your code is doing than any other technique.

It is also important to understand why you are getting error with strict and warnings. Almost always they are telling you about badness in your code. If you don't understand an error, reduce the code to a minimum that shows the error and bring both the code and the exact error message (copy and past is your friend) here and we will help.

That is problem I can't copy inside the shell and paste to anything outside it or vice-versa. I can copy within vi to vi, but that's it I even set the machine to bidirecitonal, shared clipboard, but alas, it doesn't work. This may be because I didn't want to dual boot my system. I'm on laptop.I end up taking screen shots for my Professor luckily he prefers them. I am getting pretty proficient with vi though. Still trying to figure why they would torture us with two scripting languages in 5 weeks.