Tag Archives: writing

Visual QuickStart Motor Skills

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It’s all coming back to me.

It’s no secret that Apple will soon — well, hopefully sometime in 2009, anyway — release an update to Mac OS X. It should be numbered 10.6 and it’s definitely called Snow Leopard. But that’s all I can say about it. I’m under nondisclosure and I take this stuff very seriously.

I’m working on a revision to my Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide. I just rather belatedly realized that this is the first VQS I’ve worked on in over a year and a half. The last was Leopard (10.5), which was released the same day Leopard hit the Apple stores. I think it was late October 2007. I clearly remember working on it while I traveled. I even blogged about it here, here, here, and here.

I don’t just write VQSes. I also do layout. I write and lay out in InDesign. This year, it’s a real breeze. Not only do I have all the real estate on my 24″ iMac monitor, but I also have another 24″ of real estate on the Samsung sitting next to it.

As I work, I find myself repeating the same keystrokes and mouse drags I performed all those months ago. The shortcuts and techniques have all come back to me — my hands fly over the keyboard and mouse without consulting my brain — and miraculously, they get it right. I even reprogrammed Photoshop actions using the same keystrokes I used for the last VQS project.

Is it any wonder I can completely revise typical page, with new screenshots and added page references, in less than 30 minutes?

The page reference addition is something I’m pretty excited about. Because InDesign has always lacked a good cross-referencing feature, I had to manually reference everything. As a result, I kept it simple and stuck to chapter references. For example, “I tell you more about disks and volumes in Chapter 6.” But when InDesign CS4 was released, it had one feature that made it worth the upgrade for me: cross-referencing. I think that by referencing exact pages in the book, rather than making vague references to chapter numbers, I’m making the book far more valuable as a reference tool than ever before.

At this point, two chapters are done. I’ve got 24 more to go. I’m sure you’ll read more about my progress here.

You’ll have to wait until Snow Leopard hits the shelves to read more about it.

Spelling Checkers Don’t Always Get it Right

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As these students learned the hard way.

Interesting news that hopefully taught a few Brigham Young students a valuable lesson…from Brigham Young Univ Newspaper Recalled Over “Apostle/Apostate” Mix-up.

All copies of the student paper at Brigham Young University have been recalled after a caption labeled a group of Mormon church leaders as “apostates” instead of “apostles.”

The paper claims it was typo caused by spell check. Students, the university statement suggests, are “confused” over the matter but some claim paper is known to be “sloppy” anyway. Readers were told to peruse the paper online.

The university explained: “A spelling error appeared in a photo caption in which the word ‘apostle’ was rendered as ‘apostate.’ In referring to activities at the General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last weekend, the caption read in part, ‘Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote. . . ‘.€

Given the circumstance, it’s actually pretty funny. As my Dictionary widget informs me, in the Mormon Church, an apostle is one of the twelve administrative officers of the Church. An apostate, on the other hand, is “a person who renounces a religious or political belief or system.” Whoa.

This is a grand example of today’s students’ dependency on writing tools — such as spelling checkers — to get things right. Not only did the author of the piece not know the correct spelling of apostle — in itself hard to believe when the word has such significance in that particular school — but when presented with a list of choices for the correct spelling, the student chose the wrong one. That means he or she aparently can’t read, either. Or was too lazy to look the word up in a dictionary. (Heck, I had the full definition of apostate within 5 seconds with a few keystrokes.)

Of course, it also says a lot about the proofreading — or lack thereof — of the newspaper in question by people who should know better.

This all goes back to something I’ve been saying since I began teaching and writing about word processing way back in 1990: a spelling checker will help make sure the spelling is right, but it can’t do a thing to make sure the word is right.

Hat tip to @vectorbabe on Twitter for sharing the link.

Why Print Publishing is Doomed

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At least in my opinion.

This morning, while preparing to write a blog entry about the importance of creating a meaningful bio for your social networking presence, I came across a link in my Twitter stream:

jenniferwhitley Reading @cshirky: “We don’t need newspapers, we need journalism.” http://tinyurl.com/bpxulr

Easily distracted by any task at hand, I followed the link. I found myself on a plain vanilla — indeed, default WordPress template — blog page with a long column of full-justified text just large enough to read without putting on my cheaters. It was unbroken by advertising (including unattractive or animated ads featuring jiggling fat bodies), images (including meaningless stock photos, inserted as eye candy), or even subheadings (used by so many writers, including me, to help the reader skip head to the “important” parts). It was pure content with only a trio of centered asterisks to indicate a shift in the author’s thought.

And it was good.

The blog post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” was by Clay Shirky. It summarized what has brought us to the middle of a revolution in publishing. Print publications are discovering that they can’t compete with the Internet for content delivery, no matter what they try. They’ve refused to see the reality of what’s going on. As a result, they’re not able to survive in the changing world of publishing.

Shirky compares what’s going on with the Internet and publishing today with the revolution of Gutenberg’s movable type and Aldus Manutius’s introduction of small “octavo” volumes that were less expensive to produce and easier to carry around. (I wonder…if Web publishing can be compared to movable type, can e-books and devices like the Kindle be compared to octavo volumes?) These innovation changed publishing. The brought about a revolution in how information was shared and who had access to it. This isn’t any different from today — information is more widely available than ever before.

My point here is not to summarize Clay Shirky’s excellent post. Instead, I urge to you read it. If you’re a journalist or serious blogger or any kind of writer at all, the history he summarizes and the points he brings up may be vital to your understanding of what’s going on in publishing. Indeed, I wish all of my publishers and editors would read it and begin to face the reality of what’s going on in our world. I believe that what he says applies not only to newspapers and journalism but to all publishing, including the kind of work I do.

My point is this: his finely articulated, well-researched, and extremely thoughtful piece is an example of why print publishing will ultimately go the way of hand-copied, “illuminated” texts. It’s quality content, easily accessible, for free, without advertising, on the Web.

In Defense of Microsoft Word

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It does the whole job.

About a month ago, I was having trouble with my Mac and decided to head off any serious problems by reformatting my hard disk and reinstalling all my software from original program discs. In the old days, before we all had hard drives measured in gigabytes, I did this every single time there was a major system software update. Nowadays, it’s a lot of work and I avoid doing it if I can. My 24″ iMac is just over a year old and shouldn’t have been giving me problems, but I figured I’d try the reformat before bringing it to a genius. (Turns out, it was the swapping out of 2 GB of RAM for 4 GB of RAM that probably fixed the problem.)

For some reason, I didn’t do a typical install of Microsoft Office 2004. I thought I’d save disk space by omitting the proofing tools for the languages I don’t speak — which is every language except English. Word, which I use daily, worked fine — until I noticed that it wasn’t checking spelling as I type. Although my spelling is above average, I count on Word to put red squiggly underlines under my misspellings and typos. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get this feature to start working.

I sent an update to my Twitter account about this as I went about troubleshooting the problem. The result was an outpouring of suggestions from my Twitter friends for replacing Word or Office with other software, ranging from Open Source Word or Office replacements to Google Docs.

Whoa!

I fixed the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling Word. Life went on. But it got me thinking about Office and Word and why so many people go out of their way to avoid both.

Word and Me

I should probably start off by saying that I have been using Microsoft Word since 1989 or 1990. Although I got Microsoft Works with my first Mac, I soon learned Word and began teaching it in a classroom setting. It was Word 4 for the Mac in those days; I don’t know what the corresponding version in Windows was because I didn’t use it or teach it. I’m not even sure if Microsoft Windows was a player back then.

I’ve used every version of Word for the Mac since then.

My first book about Microsoft Word was The Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6. Word 6 sucked. It was a processor hog. I remember working with it in beta as I wrote my book about it. I remember whining to my editor, asking if he thought they’d fix the performance issues before the software went out. They did, but not very well. I disliked Word 6 and the way it handled outlines and “master documents.” Everything seemed to be “embedded.” It seemed as if they’d prettied up Word to look more Mac-like and had done the job by pouring maple syrup all over the inside of my computer, bogging things down.

Word 98 was a vast improvement. From then on, each version of Word was an improvement. The interface remained basically the same but features were added and solidified. Some of the features worked with Microsoft server software, which I didn’t have, didn’t want, and certainly didn’t need. All I cared about was that Word did what I needed it to do, using the same interface I knew from years of experience as a user.

The End of the World as We Know It: Office 2007

Then Office 2007 for Windows came out with its ridiculous “ribbon” interface. What the hell was Microsoft thinking? Take a standardized interface that your existing user base knows by heart and throw it out the window. Force them to learn a whole new interface. Keep telling them that it’s easier and maybe a handful of morons will believe you.

I had to use Office 2007 for two Excel books. The only good thing I can say about it is that the complete, radical interface change — I’m talking menus vs. ribbon here, not spreadsheet basics — made a book about the software necessary. How else would users figure out how to get the job done? Fortunately (for users, not authors) Office 2007 adoption is slow.

Woe is Me: Office 2008

Word 2008 Splash ScreenOf course, I’m a Mac user and use the Mac version of Office. I held my breath when Office 2008 came out. Thank heaven they didn’t get rid of the menu bar — although I don’t understand how they could. Office 2008 retains much of the Office 2004 interface. It just adds what Microsoft calls “Element Galleries” and the usual collection of features that 1% of the computing world cares about. Fortunately, you can ignore them and continue using Office applications with the same old menus and shortcut keys we all know.

I would have switched to Office 2008 — I even had it installed on my MacBook Pro — except for two things:

  • Its default document formats are not compatible with versions of office prior to Office 2007. That means someone using Word 2003 for Windows or Word 2004 for Mac can’t open my documents unless I save them in an Office 2004-compatible format. This isn’t a huge deal, but it is something I’d have to remember every single time I saved a document. I’d also have to remember not to use any Office feature that only worked with Office 2007 or 2008.
  • It does not support Visual Basic Macros. One of my publishers makes me use a manuscript template that’s chock-full of these macros. Can’t access the macros, can’t use the template. Can’t use the template, can’t use Office 2008.

(I wrote about these frustrations extensively in a Maria’s Guides article.)

So I’m apparently stuck with Office 2004 — at least for a while.

But do you know what? I’m perfectly happy with it.

Why I Like Word

I like Word. I really do. It does everything I need it to do and it does it well.

Sure, it has a bunch of default options that are set stupidly. I wrote about how to set them more intelligently in an article for Informit.com. (Read “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) It certainly includes far more features than the average writer needs or uses. And despite what Microsoft might tell you, it’s probably not the best tool for page layout (I prefer InDesign) or mail merge (I prefer FileMaker Pro). But it does these things if you need to.

I use all of the basic word processing features. I use the spelling checker — both as I type and to correct errors. I like smart cut and paste, although I have the ridiculous Paste Options button turned off. I like AutoComplete and love AutoCorrect (when set up properly). I use all kinds of formatting, including paragraph and character styles, tables, and bulleted lists. I rely on the outlining features when preparing to write a book or script for video training material. I use the thesaurus occasionally when I can’t get my mind around the exact word I’m looking for, although the word I want is usually not listed.

I’ve used some of the advanced features, such as table of contents generation, indexing, and cross-references. These are great document automation features. Trouble is, I don’t usually use Word to create documents that require these features. I use InDesign for laying out my books, which are usually illustrated. (And I admit that I’m looking forward to trying out the new cross-referencing feature in InDesign CS4 for my next book.)

I don’t jump on board with every new Word feature. I prefer the Formatting toolbar over the Formatting Palette. I write in Normal view rather than Page Layout view. I create my own templates but don’t use the ones that come with Word.

I don’t use the grammar checker; I think it’s a piece of crap designed for people who know neither grammar nor writing style. I don’t like URLs formatted as links. (Who the hell wants links underlined in printed documents?) I don’t use any of the Web publishing features; I’d rather code raw HTML than trust Word to do it for me. I very seldom insert images or objects or anything other than text in my documents. I have InDesign for serious layout work. I don’t use wizards. WordArt is UglyI think WordArt is ugly and amateurish. I keep the silly Office Assistant feature turned off.

I admit that I don’t use any of the project features that work with Entourage — although I’d like to. I decided a while back to switch to Apple’s e-mail, calendar, and contact management solutions (Mail, iCal, and Address Book respectively) because they’d synchronize with .Mac (now MobileMe) and my Treo. Entourage probably does this now, but I really don’t feel like switching again. Am still thinking about this.

The point is, I use a bunch of Word features and I completely ignore a bunch of others. The features are there if I need them but, in Word 2004, they’re not in your face, screaming for attention. (Wish I could say the same about Word 2008.)

iWork with Apple Computers

iWork '09Lots of people think that just because I’m a Macintosh user — an enthusiast, in fact — I should be using Apple’s business productivity solution: iWork. For a while, I thought so, too.

I own iWork ’08. I just bought iWork ’09. I’ve tried Pages. I’ve really tried Pages. I wanted to use it. I wanted to break free of Microsoft Word.

But old habits are hard to break. No matter how much I tried to use Pages each time I needed to create a document, when I was rushed, I reached for Word. No learning curve — I already know it. After a while, I just stopped trying to use Pages.

Why Use a Bunch of One Trick Ponies?

I know a bunch of writers who swear by one software program or another for meeting their writing needs. They use special outliners to create outlines. They use special “writing software” that covers the entire screen with a blank writing surface so they’re not distracted by other things on their desktops. They use special software to brainstorm, footnote, and index.

I’ve tried these solutions and do you know what? They don’t make my life easier. Instead, they just give me another piece of software to learn and keep up to date and interface with other software. They make more work for me.

I’m not going to forget my Word skills and Word isn’t going to suddenly disappear off the face of the planet anytime soon. In fact, it’s far more likely for one of these one-trick ponies to disappear than a powerhouse with millions of users worldwide like Microsoft Office.

Thought PatternI remember ThoughtPattern, a program by Bananafish Software. I saw it demoed at a Macworld Expo in the early 1990s and thought it was the greatest thing in the world for organizing my thoughts and ideas. I was sure it would make me a better writer. I was so convinced, I bought it — and it wasn’t cheap. I used it for a while and rather liked it. Evidently, I was one of very few people who’d joined the ThoughtPattern revolution. In April 1993, it was discontinued. I was left with software that wouldn’t work with subsequent versions of the Macintosh system software. Worst of all, the documents I created with ThoughtPattern were in their own proprietary format. When the software stopped working, the contents of those documents were lost. (Do you think it was easy to find a screenshot from software that was discontinued 16 years ago?)

So perhaps you can understand my aversion to one-trick ponies that promise a better writing experience.

Will the same thing happen with Microsoft Word? I don’t think so.

I Don’t Compute in the Cloud

Google Docs was one of the solutions suggested to me by my Twitter friends. I guess they think it’s better to avoid the evil Microsoft empire in favor of the “we’re not evil” Google empire. Along the way, I should give up the interface and features I know from almost 20 years of experience with the software and rely on an online application that could change its interface daily. Oh, yeah — and keep my documents on someone else’s computer.

Yeah. Right. Good idea.

Not.

Until I’m part of a multinational corporation that requires its employees and consultants to keep all their documents on some remote server for collaboration purposes, I will not be computing in the cloud.

One of the things I like about keeping my documents on my own computer — rather than a remote server accessible by the Internet — is that the Internet is not always available. What do I do then? Stop working?

Security is an issue, too. While I don’t usually write much of a confidential nature, I don’t like the idea of not having control over my documents. Servers get hacked. I don’t want my work suddenly accessible to people who I don’t want seeing it.

I will admit that I use MobileMe’s iDisk feature to keep some documents on an Apple server. This makes it a tiny bit easier to access them from my laptop when I’m away from home. But I’ve recently moved to a new strategy. I bought a pocket hard drive that’s bigger than my computer’s Home folder. Before I hit the road with my laptop on a trip for business or pleasure, I sync this portable drive with my Home folder. I then have every single document on my computer with me when I’m away. The added benefit: complete offsite backup.

That’s My Case

That’s my defense of Microsoft Word. I rest my case.

Please understand that I’m not trying to convince a non-Word user to switch to Word. If you’re happy with something else, stick with it! That’s the precise reason I’m sticking with Word. I’m happy with it.

I guess the reason I wrote this post was to assure other people like me that there’s no reason to be ashamed of being a Word user. You do what’s right for you. There’s nothing really wrong with Word. If it makes your life easier, why switch?

Writing Tips: Soaking Up Creative Energy

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What is it and how can I tap into it?

The other day, I posted a blog entry about distractions. In it, I shared an exchange between me and one of my Twitter friends. He’d tweeted that the coffee shop he was trying to write in was distracting. When I asked why he’d try to write there, he said the place had “creative energy.”

On “Creative Energy”

I should start out by saying that I don’t really believe in “energy” as the term is used by New Age folks. I’m a skeptic about most things and the older I get, the more skeptical I get. So if he was referring to some kind of weird, new age “energy” fields — like the vortexes supposedly in Sedona — he completely lost me (and much of my respect).

But I don’t think he meant it that way. (At least I hope not.) I think he meant something I do believe in and understand.

Did you ever go someplace or do something or read something or see something that made you feel almost feverish about writing (or painting or doing something else creative)? It’s as if this place or thing gave you a poke with a creative juice taser. After (or during) the experience, you must create. You’re driven to create.

I really can’t describe it any better than that.

On WritingThis happens to me once in a while. Stephen King’s book, On Writing, made me feel like this. Although I couldn’t put the book down, I also couldn’t wait to get back to my novel in progress the whole time I was reading it. (And no, I’m not a big Stephen King fan.)

I’ve also felt this way other times. It’s a great feeling. It reminds me of why I wanted to be a writer.

It’s frustrating, too, because when it hits, I’m not always prepared to drop everything and get to work. Sometimes, it hits when I’m traveling on vacation or for business and I simply can’t make the workplace I need to get the words out. Or by the time I can, I’m too exhausted by the day’s activities and can only sleep.

I think my Twitter friend was referring to this feeling. I think he feels this way in the coffee shop he tweeted to us about, or in other places like it with “creative energy.”

Soak it Up!

I don’t think that places with creative energy are the best places to write if they’re also filled with distractions. But that certainly doesn’t mean a creative person should avoid them. Instead, why not use them as a place to soak up that energy?

Take my Twitter friend’s coffee shop example. How could you tap into the creative energy you might feel in a place like that?

Sit down with your coffee at a corner table, facing the room. Have your journal open and your pen handy. Take notes about what you see and hear. The woman with blue streaks in her hair is carrying a molecular biology text book. That guy’s accent is weird, like a cross between Australia and New Jersey. Those two women are talking about the guy sitting in the opposite corner, staring into space. There’s a crack in the ceiling that looks as if it might have been dripping last week. The smell of coffee is strong in the air. A song you haven’t heard in years has just come on over the speakers. It reminds you of the road trip you took during college.

Any of these people can be characters in a book or screenplay. The things they talk about can be ideas for articles or nonfiction works. What’s going on around you can trigger ideas that can get your creative juices flowing and help you break the writer’s block that may have sent you to the coffee shop in the first place.

But not if you try to build your workplace among these distractions by keeping your eyes on your laptop or notepad and earphones in your ears — which is what my Twitter friend was apparently trying to do.

Work in your workplace. Soak up the creative energy of other places by actively paying attention to it when you find it.

There’s More than One Work Mode

For a writer, there’s more than one way to work.

Sure, you can go into your distraction-free working place, as I discussed in my earlier post, focus on your writing, and churn out the words. That’s one work mode. The one that actually produces finished (or nearly finished) text.

But you may need to do things that generate the ideas and get you fired up about writing. If going to a coffee shop with “creative energy” does that for you, it’s an important part of your writing routine. I might think of it as the “pre-work” mode. And for folks who write fiction, there’s nothing better than an hour or so of people watching with your journal nearby to get those creative juices flowing.

And people watching isn’t the only pre-work you can do. Take a walk in the park and jot down notes about what you see. What’s the weather like? What does it smell like? What do you hear? Go to the supermarket at a weird off-hour. What’s it like? Hang around outside an office or retail space before it opens or as its closing. What’s going on? Think about the scenes in your work-in-progress and go to places like them to get the real-life scoop of what they’re all about.

Pay attention! You’ll be amazed by what you come away with.

Remember: Characters, dialog, and plot are only three components of fiction. Scene is another. Doing your homework can help you write about realistic scenes.

As for journals…well, I need cover the importance of those in another post.