Poet Ponders the Digital

My students like to use Google Docs for collaborative drafts of projects. They like the "Suggesting" mode for editing, though it takes time to get used to this approach compared to Microsoft Word, and they really like the "Chat" mode for working together remotely. I'm not as comfortable with Google's "Suggesting" edit mode. I like the "Track Changes" approach of Word, but that might be out of familiarity. The "Revision History" is also little clunky in Google Docs. Students have rolled back edits by accident, especially on tablets. Maybe the location of the "Editing Mode" and "History" (the upper right) makes them prone to accidental "palm clicks" when holding the devices. I've not used the JavaScript-based macro features, but I am glad there is a way to automate editing tasks. One of the reasons I love Word is the ease of Visual Basic for Applications. JavaScript ("GScript") ...

In the last two weeks, several of my students have mentioned that employers expected them to know macro programming for Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel, and Access. I've written many times that students should aim for at least intermediate knowledge of Word, including the concept of macros if not coding skills. However, the inclusion of Excel and Access was a little surprising. Maybe it shouldn't be, since what made Lotus 1-2-3 the "killer application" for PCs was its macro abilities. WordPerfect also had exceptional macros back in the DOS days, helping it become dominant for many years. Note: I'm not sure I'd call the VBA code in Access "macro" coding, but it is Visual Basic and often the code used in workplaces exists in snippets. I won't post my gripes with most of what I've seen done in Access, but I have a long list of bad habits I've seen in workplaces. Still, employers use it for small projects and it isn...

Use the best tool for the job. It's a simple saying, and one many writers ignore. Paper and pencil, while often my preferred tools for writing, have not been the best tools for writing for at least a century. Typewriters are better, if you are concerned with speed and legibility. Typewriters with correction tape gave us another reason to prefer the mechanical to graphite sticks and wood pulp. I remember my sense of awe when I saw the earliest word processors. These were typewriters with memory, and sometimes a disk drive. Not quite computers, but certainly something more than a manual typewriter, I wanted one… but never owned one. Instead, I upgraded from a blue Smith Corona manual typewriter to a brown Brother electric. Even after receiving an early home computer, a Commodore VIC-20, the typewriter was the best device for writing quickly. My first real computer, a Tandy 1000, included a simple suite called DeskMate. I used the text editor to write stories, saving the...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley March 3, 2014 Deadline April 2014 Issue More Than a Typewriter: The Power of Word Typewriters still amaze me, especially the antique mechanical models. There’s something wonderful about the feel of levers, gears, springs and rollers working together to transmit thoughts into words. Typewriters possess a romance computer keyboards and touch screens lack. But, please, stop using your word processor like a typewriter. Word processor abuse mars many otherwise good documents. Bad habits people develop over time lead to documents that are ugly and difficult to edit and revise. The numerous excuses for improper word processing deserve dismissal. It does not take days or even hours to learn to use tabs effectively. Paragraph styles take minutes to understand and appreciate. Even a complex looking table of contents takes only a few mouse clicks to create if you construct a document properly. When you know more about your software tools, you also kno...

I overuse some words and phrases in my writing. Most writers have some problem words. It isn't that the words should never be used, or that we use them incorrectly. We simply use them too frequently. The following Microsoft Word VBA macro marks words I should check for overuse. Also included are words and phrases I should avoid. Feel free to copy and modify this macro. I encourage my students to try this macro, too. Once you have the macro in Word, you can alter the word list to reflect your preferences and habits. Sub macWordsToAvoid() Dim vFindText As Variant Dim txtWord As Variant 'list the exceptions to look for in an array vFindText = Array("about", "all", "almost", "a lot", "already", "always", "along with", _ "anxiously", "absolutely", "as well", "believe", "certainly", "clearly", "definitely", _ "eagerly",...

We learned a lesson tonight when I was trying to submit a script to a production company: PDFs from DOC files are much, much smaller than PDFs generated from DOCX files. Microsoft Word migrated from the familiar ".DOC" format of Word 97-2004 with the release of Word 2007/2008 (Windows/OS X). I recall the painful transition from Word 95 to Word 97, but nothing has compared to the nightmare that is the DOCX "Office XML" file format. I appreciate the idea of XML-based documents. Unfortunately, Microsoft's DOCX seems to cause a fair amount of pain. The 101-page script stored as a DOCX refused to convert to a compressed and optimized PDF with Acrobat Distiller, Acrobat Pro, or Apple's built-in PDF driver. This left me able to create only an uncompressed PDF. The file was 62 megabytes! A 184 kilobyte document exploded to 62MB… and it couldn't be emailed through our server. Saving the document as a DOC file, the document grew to 214KB, a bit larger than...

Monday night, I spent an hour reviewing basic Word skills with my students. One student asked why she needed to learn the "right" way to use Word, when nobody cared if you used spaces instead of tabs, hit return instead of inserting page breaks, and manually numbered your pages. I was stunned, to say the least, that anyone — especially a child of the digital age — could suggest software skills aren't important. Learning to use any application effectively eventually saves time and improves your work. If you learn how to use Word moderately well, you save minutes a day, and those minutes become hours over a month. Learning any application's features opens up new possibilities. I tell my students that letting Word automate some tasks frees more time to focus on the words instead of the formatting. To me, this is a self-evident observation: I would rather spend time writing rather than formatting. And then, on Wednesday, I received an official departmental syllabus ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 6, 2012 Deadline March 2012 Issue The Publishing Revolution: Create Your Own E-Book Publish your book this year! Only a few years ago, “vanity presses” used such pitches to appeal to aspiring writers. For a fee, the vanity publishers would convert your manuscript into a reasonably nice book. Vanity publishers are nothing more than print brokers. Using a vanity publisher was expensive, but for some aspiring writers it was their last option. Many writers ended up with boxes of books in their garages and attics. Yet, I am writing this column to tell you that it is time to publish your book. Forget the vanity publishers and the small publishers that pass along many of the costs to writers. Publish your book as an e-book. It will cost you little (or nothing) and if you discover the book is popular, then you can consider an old-fashioned paper and ink book. Even writers with proven track records are leaving the traditional New York publ...

One of my favorite writing tools is Word Counter 2.1, from Supermagnus Software. http://www.supermagnus.com/mac/Word_Counter/ The price? Free. The value? To quote a popular credit card company, "Priceless." If you're like most of my students, you're asking yourself, "Doesn't every word processor include a word count function? What's the big deal?" Yes, most editing and word processing applications do count words, sentences, and paragraphs. However, I'm more interested in two features that are either incomplete or missing from word processors and layout applications: word frequency counts and readability analyses. Again, most applications provide at least the ability to create these reports, but none of them match the speed or ease of Word Counter. There are several reason I use Word Counter: Not every text editor I use provides real-time word counts; Word counts are curiously inaccurate within some applications; Macros for Word that ...

Most writers develop patterns in their prose. Experts can use these patterns to calculate the likelihood that a given text was written by a particular author. For example, my weaknesses include "unfortunately" and "just." President Obama overuses the phrase, "Let me be clear." Does the president need our permission to be clear? I doubt anyone tries to obstruct presidential clarity. Since buying my first copy of WordPerfect for DOS, I've maintained macros to help locate and remove my personal textual demons. The idea is simple: automatically highlight the words and phrases I might want to revise before submitting the text to an editor. Four years ago, a student noticed the red words in an open Word document on my laptop. She asked if the highlighting was part of Word's grammar or spellcheck features. I explained to her that when I finish writing a document I run several macros to mark potential problems. When the student asked for a copy of the...

For the last couple of days I have been reformatting and revising a Word document I created and then passed along to colleagues. Unfortunately the colleagues used "brute force" to alter the formatting of the document. This formatting method rendered the automatic table of contents, title page fields, and indices useless. Brute force formatting is when you override the style of a paragraph or word to match another style's appearance. For example, instead of changing a "Normal" paragraph to "Heading 2" for a section, the editor of the document simply increased the size of the text and applied "bold-italic" font attributes. As a result, headings created this way did not appear in the table of contents. Such formatting was applied throughout the document. In once case, a bullet list appeared in the table of contents because the style was "Heading 3" — with brute force formatting to make the text appear like the "List Paragraph...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 2, 2010 Deadline September Issue Learning to Program, Learning to Think Several times a month I create or modify computer code, but I use the skills I have gained from programming on a daily basis. The more I learn about computer languages and programming, the more I learn to think creatively to solve problems. Our schools are asked to prepare students for standardized tests, primarily on English and math skills. We frequently claim we want students to learn creative problem solving, but we test memorized knowledge. State and national tests focus on knowing such things as the meanings of words and how to solve math problems with memorized equations. I don’t question the value of memorizing Latin and Greek roots or the quadratic equation, but teaching how to think is essential to the future. Computer programming requires analyzing a problem, breaking a possible solution into small parts and then writing the code to perform the steps requir...

How do I respond to student writing using online technologies? I tend to make extensive use of Microsoft Word's "track changes" and "reviewing" modes. The real challenge for me as an instructor is to not make every edit for a student. My primary concern, and research seems to support this, is that students have been inculcated with the notion that you make the suggested corrections, no more or no less, and that is what constitutes "revising" a paper. Online, this habit becomes even easier... cut-and-paste or simply "accept change" and the revising is "done" in the view of many students. When I first started student teaching, in the late 1980s, I fell into the trap of making too many comments on papers. Now, I try to minimize how often I correct mistakes students need to discover. I also do not make as many suggestions as I did years ago. Online tools have made editing and leaving short comments much easier. For all the dang...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 2007 Issue November 11, 2007 Computer Skills Our Students Need Page numbers seemed to be a half-inch lower on each successive page. I stared at the mid-term paper, handed in to me by a junior at the university, and thought back to my fights with dot-matrix printers. When I was an undergrad, my Epson FX/80 printer jammed often and would sometimes rip pages after the sprockets slipped out of alignment with the punched holes of the perforated paper. Surely the undergraduate author of this paper suffered the curse of a similarly possessed printer, I told myself. “I guess when I changed the margins I forgot to retype the page numbers. At least I remembered to use five spaces to indent each paragraph.” Sure enough, changing Microsoft Word’s options to enable viewing of “non-printing characters” revealed a document littered with extra spaces, manually numbered pages, and the occasional extra “hard return” used to maintain double-spaced text....