When it comes to matters of typography, I am clearly a babe in the woods and sit at the feet of people such as Dick Margulis, who had this to say about my weekend post on the evils of using the Courier font:
Times New Roman was a terrible, terrible choice for a default serif font in Word–and the fact that it is the Word default font is the reason so many people use it. It was designed to be used in a narrow newspaper column (the Times of London), and as such it is a semi-condensed face. That means that with normal (default) margins on US letter-size paper, there are too many characters on a line for comfortable, extended reading.
If you’re going to recommend TNR for mss., you need to recommend, as well, that margins be bumped up to 1.5 inches. That leaves a 5.5 inch type column, and 12 point TNR is satisfactory (if boring) on that measure, because it averages 65 characters per line–close to the limit for extended reading.
However, there are much better choices, even within the default font set that installs with Word, for reading comfort.
So there it is. Times New Roman isn’t your friend, any more than Courier is; so be aware of that, and that there may be issues with your favorite font, as well.
To clarify, I’m speaking here mostly of printed documents that will be sent out as queries and proposals, not as manuscripts to be read on-screen, where one can, of course, change the font so that one can read in whatever way makes one comfortable.
Dick does add:
Oh, and I completely agree with you about Courier. I see it recommended all the time in books about submitting to agents. I even see it listed as a requirement on agent sites. But there’s really no good reason for it that I can see.
Learning about fonts (as I clearly still am) is part of being … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Tools, Doing the Right Thing, Words, Usage on July 21st, 2008
I may have addressed this already, but in the interests of both my sanity and new readers of my blog, I’m going to take it up again.
Repeat after me: it is no longer the convention to place two spaces between sentences.
To my amazement, this seems to be one of the most difficult changes to the way we produce copy for people to accept. And some simply don’t. One of my consulting clients, a marketing firm, has two very highly placed employees who refuse to believe me and continue to place the two spaces between sentences despite my constant and no doubt annoying entreaties to remove one of them. They’re both old enough to have taken typing classes on typewriters, so I’ll cut them a very little slack; but other clients, far younger, are having the same difficulty.
Yet there’s not a single usage guide today that advocates doing so. In fact, a colleague of mine tells me that when he was learning typesetting in 1954 he was told to not insert two spaces!
Typewriters use fixed-width or monosized fonts. Computer fonts (with the exception of Courier, meant to duplicate the look of a typewriter) do not. Treating computers like typewriters –– and making the assumption that rules that work with one will work with the other — is just plain silly.
There are a few resources out there that deal with this particular issue along with other transitions from fixed-font to variable-font devices: Robin Williams’ two books, The Mac is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Macintosh (as well as an edition for PC users) are excellent if a little dated (they came out as revised editions in 1995).
A succinct summary of the convention is available in an article in Upper and Lower Case Magazine, Double Spaces Between Sentences … NOT!, in which the author, Ilene Strizver, notes,
Conversely, nearly all computer fonts (except Courier) have proportional spacing, which means that the width of the characters and the spacing surrounding them are in proportion to each other. Proportional spacing results in a more even, balanced appearance. Because of this, a single space is enough to create the necessary visual separation between sentences.
So … don’t do it. One space after punctuation (periods are most frequently abused, though some writers add double spaces after colons, semicolons, and even commas as well) is the current law of the publishing land. Don’t make your manuscript stand out because of its errors, especially one as easily fixed as this one (a global search-and-replace will take care of it nicely).
And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Doing the Right Thing, About Writing, Usage on June 29th, 2008
From Wikipedia:
“Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed.
“Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen (see blog scraping) from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.
“There is frequent confusion between the terms “splog” and “spam in blogs”. Splogs are blogs where the articles are fake, and are only created for search engine spamming. To spam in blogs, conversely, is to include random comments on the blogs of innocent bystanders, in which spammers take advantage of a site’s ability to allow visitors to post comments that may include links.”
I want to say a little more about this, because it is a problem and has in a sense hijacked the public’s perception of search engine optimization. And since a) Customline Wordware does SEO and b) I continue to work ethically, it’s worth talking a little more about it.
Here’s Wired’s take on the issue: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/splogs.html (or http://tinyurl.com/knra7)
From the article: “Extreme vulnerability to spam, he says, is a defining characteristic of Web 2.0, and splogs are its first manifestation.”
SEO unfortunately got a lot of early bad publicity through those who abused it, and some of the dirt sticks; but like any other business technique, it can be used correctly and ethically, or it can be abused. Splogs (whether generated by people hired to write them or, as is done more frequently, stolen from other sites via bots) are indeed proliferating, and it’s hard to see where it will end. The author of the Wired piece seems to think that it could end the net as we know it. Stay tuned to see…
It’s worthwhile to occasionally put a long, unique phrase from your web copy into Google and see if it is being copied anywhere. I’ve found my posts copied elsewhere, and have had varying success in getting them removed, depending on the site owners and/or hosting company.
What can you do? Try this: Copyscape.com is a service with free and paid modes where you can check for pages that are duplicating the content from a particular URL.
And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Doing the Right Thing, search engine optimization, SEO on May 4th, 2008
Yes, I said it. Anyone who knows me knows how far I’ll go to impress upon people the ethical requirement to patronize one’s local independent bookseller (”or they won’t be around any longer,” is my usual tagline here). And I still believe that, with all my heart. And I love love love my local booksellers and can’t imagine life without them.
But as I get older I’m less binary in my thinking, and I don’t believe that the Amazon/local bookseller necessarily has to be an either/or proposition.
Look at it this way. The goal for any published author is to sell thousands and thousands of copies of her books in a very short time, and she needs to be willing to do whatever is necessary to work with her publisher to make that happen.
And there’s no denying that Amazon is an excellent tool. The company actually does the industry a lot of good.
I love independent booksellers, but for economic reasons they are not always able to do what Amazon can and does (giving publishers workable terms and not ship returns, for example); and the reality is that for authors as well as for publishers and independent booksellers, selling books is a business.
The other thing I’m noticing about Amazon is that it is a tremendous marketing tool. Many people search Amazon for books and then buy them from their local independent bookseller. You can’t call a local bookseller or and ask the sales people to read you the blurb, the first chapter, or the reviews; and if you don’t happen to live close to said bookseller, this can be a problem — but you can get that information from Amazon.
Yes, Amazon is an impersonal megalithic corporation, and I don’t believe for a second that corporations are our friends. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot use them to our advantage, because they’re not going away anytime soon. Buy your books whenever possible at your local independent bookseller — I stand by my signature phrase — but don’t dismiss Amazon as a great venue for selling your books, as well.
And less binary thinking would be healthy for everyone … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Publicity, Books, Tools, Doing the Right Thing on February 27th, 2008
As NPR today has a show exploring how the art world and artistic expression are dealing with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I need to report that I’m already ahead of the curve there. Not in anything I’ve published in real life, but in an art installation in the virtual world of Second Life.
I’m already well acquainted with Second Life, as I co-write Second Seeker, a blog that reviews PG-to-R-rated places and activities in Second Life, and also co-authored chapter three of Wiley’s new book, the Official Guide to Second Life. But when my co-author, who is an artist in Second Life, approached me about collaborating on a project there, I was indecisive.
I’m used to having a lot of control in my writing. By its very nature, writing is linear: one reads from front to back, top to bottom, and the author is thus able to control how his or her words appear to the reader. What Paul was asking me to do was allow my words to float in the air as others walked through the installation — including walking through the words themselves! What that meant was that I could group pieces of the words together, but know that some people will start reading in one spot, some in another, and that all will walk through the installation in different ways.
It was one incredible challenge. Yet I was ready to do something. I’d become first tired of and then angry with people telling me to not take politics so personally — the political is always personal. So I wrote something that expressed my pain … and could be read with different starting-points.
And the political is always
personal.
And God bless America
isn’t anywhere in
the Bible.
Paul — or PleaseWakeMeUp Idler, as he is known in Second Life — created an incredible build with my words as a starting-point. In one space, visitors are walking through films of red, causing one reviewer to call them a “fog of blood.” In another, faces of Iraquis follow the visitor along with the plaintive words — “Why am I dying?” Yet another space speaks of and illustrates conspicuous consumption, the energy that drives acquisition and aggression. One illustration shows Americans clutching Bibles and guns; on the flip side is an Iraqui clutching the Koran and a gun. Finally, one section of the installation requires one to confront the names of American military dead — and the names of Iraqui civilians dead.
As one reviewer notes,
I didn’t know what to expect, but the wall of text that greeted me - names, ranks, ages, dates, places of death, sickened me. I could have known these people. Some were so young. Some of the notes left me ill. “body found near…”, “Baghdad?”, “checkpoint on outskirts of…”, “road between…”, “throat slit”, “Mother of”, “Son of”, “Sister of”, “Father of”.
What are these children, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers doing now? Now that their loved ones have been taken for nothing more than senseless greed?
The installation — called Political is Personal — will be available for viewing in Second Life until the end of March. Come make yourself an avatar in Second Life and visit it. It’s so far beyond the elements of style that I’m not even going to use that catchphrase here today.
Posted in Process Matters, Doing the Right Thing, Words on February 6th, 2008
The appearance of Amazon’s new ebook reader, Kindle, has rekindled online debates about The End of Literature As We Know It and the probability that piracy will shortly reduce all writers to starving in garrets (if they’re not already doing so). One particularly strident member of one of my Internet discussion groups is predicting that all content will now be up for grabs to whomever wants it and that online content is merely another way to spell “screw the writer.”
And while some of these concerns are real and justified, the reality is that technology is at the helm these days. If it can be done, it will be done, and instead of complaining we’d all perhaps do best to adapt. The Navajo talk about being in harmony with one’s environment, including change in that environment; and the Darwininan notion of adaptation or extinction is very much relevant here. Reading is no longer confined to peering at words written on dead trees, and the faster we incorporate that notion into our thinking, the better we’ll all be able to weather some of the storms ahead.
For there will be storms. No birth occurs without pain, and in many ways we’re still enduring the pangs of the naiscent Technology Age. Computer use and the Internet have changed nearly everything about everything we do, and so it’s no small surprise that reading and writing are affected as well.
Many people still prefer to hold physical books in their hands. Many others happily read from laptop or ebook reader screens or even mobile devices. There’s no question of which is better, either from a quality or a moral standpoint; there’s simply a question of how we’re going to adapt.
In a recent New York Times articles entitled “Crossover Dreams,” Motoko Rich notes the number of books that appeared first online (either as blogs or in fact as serialized or full ebook offerings, all of them free) and that were later sold as print books, in some cases for very impressive advances. While they are not necessarily the norm, they do exist, one of many ways that new technologies and subsequent reader habits are changing the way books are published.
Will there be theft? Of course there will be: it’s apparently part of human nature to want something for nothing. Will those thefts overwhelm the system and destroy content creators? Of course they won’t: the majority of people do still pay for what they receive and will continue to do so, whether the format is traditional or electronic.
The sky isn’t falling yet. But it will for those who believe that they can control the way the world is moving. For the rest of us, keeping up is keeping us … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Books, Tools, Doing the Right Thing, About Writing, The Cutting Edge, Creativity, Technology, Reading on December 16th, 2007
Okay, apparently I didn’t even scratch the surface of my pet peeves in an earlier column. So I think I’ll address them one at a time – beginning, today, with one of the most obvious.
Subject lines.
If you’re on an e-list, or even if you’re simply sending emails, the subject line you choose may make the difference between whether your message is caught by a spam filter or not, or whether it is read by its intended recipient or not.
A recent plea for assistance with a technical matter on an e-list to which I belong had this subject line: “Please help.”
Wow. That’s clear. Not only does it sound resoundingly like spam, it tells me nothing about the subject of the email. You want help, you make sure that the rest of the sentence is in the subject line: “Need help accessing old files,” for example.
I cannot say how many times a day I receive an email with a subject line that reads, “From Bob” (obviously, insert name of choice instead of my randomly chosen “Bob”). You didn’t notice the From line, folks? The subject of your email is the fact that you are writing to me?
I receive, easily, over 400 emails a day. I do a lot of subject-line scanning. I know I’ve probably lost valuable information from time to time because of bad subject lines. And I very much doubt that I’m alone in this.
Please please please write a real subject line (i.e., something that refers to the actual topic of your email) in the subject line space, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Doing the Right Thing, About Writing, Words on December 13th, 2007
One of the things I used to do for a living was teach people to write effective, professional, and courteous business letters. Well, the mills have pretty much closed on that particular revenue stream, but it’s worth perhaps taking a look back and seeing what got lost – and what we might want to recapture – with the advent of the internet and email.
Emails today may or may not be effective, depending on the writer; some manage to be professional; but very few people seem to feel a need for them to be courteous.
So perhaps it’s time to revisit email etiquette 101:
- DO respond when someone emails you. I’ve often sent information requests to an individual in a company with which I do business and received no response in return, even though I know that person is in front of his computer. In these days of questionable deliverability, it’s a good idea to respond with a simple “Okay, I saw what you need, I’ll get back to you by Thursday.”
- DON’T ignore emails. Not quite the same as the above; if you don’t know the answer or cannot give the person what she needs, then just say so. You’d never stay silent on the telephone and not respond to the other person; don’t do it via email, either.
- DO phrase requests as requests. Words like “please” and “thank you” and “when you have time” are as necessary in email as they are in real life (you do use them in real life, don’t you?)
- DON’T assume that people can “hear” your tone. What is meant to be humorous can be hurtful. If there’s a “wrong” way to interpret anything, someone will find it.
We all live and work on the net to some extent. Maybe it’s not too much to hope that we can all play together nicely?
And then we’ll all be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Frustration, Process Matters, Doing the Right Thing, About Writing, Words, Technology on December 6th, 2007
I have to admit that when it comes to Thanksgiving, I’m a bit of a bah-humbug sort of person. I don’t celebrate the holiday and it makes me vaguely uncomfortable, as you’ll see in a moment.
But I do want to say that taking time off to acknowledge everything for which we are thankful is an excellent idea, and one we should implement all year, not just on one day. I’m grateful for so many things and many people: the growth of my company, Customline Wordware, and for all my wonderful clients who make it possible; for my sales team, headed up by Julia Blackburn, and mostly, my business partner, friend, and husband, Paul Cézanne. I’m grateful to my publishers for continuing to put my words out there, and for my literary agent, Philip G. Spitzer for enabling that to happen. I’m grateful to my readers (”if a writer falls in the forest…”) who mean the world to me: I don’t know who all of you are, but I thank you!
As for the rest … well, I explain my attitude best in this op-ed I wrote that appeared in last week’s Provincetown Banner:
Thanksgiving, Provincetown-Style
Having decided not to travel for the holiday (the sanest course of action when one considers how difficult flying anywhere has become), I found myself recently wondering how to spend it. While I’m totally onboard with the general sentiment of the time – it’s an incontestably Good Thing to stop and feel gratitude for all we have and all we are, and an even Better Thing to thank people who have been good to us this year – I’ve never been able to feel right about celebrating a holiday that has its historical roots in a genocide.
So how does one mark the day?
At one time the Wampanoag did a sort of anti-Thanksgiving at Plimoth Plantation, but I’ve not been able to find anything out about it in recent years. And while one could of course go to one of the local restaurants and gorge oneself, it seems a little pointless. So I was delighted when the solution was suggested to me: perhaps I should celebrate Thanksgiving exactly like the first Europeans did!
You don’t have to go far to research the roots of the holiday: the museum up at the Provincetown Monument tells the story. The Pilgrims, we learn via a diorama there, were close to starvation and despair when they suddenly found some corn! It was carefully stacked and well preserved, apparently just waiting for them. They rejoiced over that discovery, took the corn back to their ships, and thus famously survived the winter.
So here’s my plan: on Thanksgiving morning, I’m going to break into the Grand Union grocery store over on Shankpainter Road. I’m going to proceed to the canned vegetables aisle (it is, after all, past the season for fresh vegetables) and take the corn I find stacked there. Surely the store owners and the local police will understand, just as no doubt the rightful owners of that original harvest did, right? Stealing is, apparently, a holiday tradition.
Okay, so I’m not going to really do it, but it’s a tempting thought. After all, as long as you get to write the history books, you can – apparently – do whatever you want. Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving indeed, on this and on every day! Being grateful puts us all … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Process Matters, Doing the Right Thing, Etc., Words on November 22nd, 2007
Imagine searching the web, the way you do every day … but with a twist: what if your search included donations to your charity or nonprofit of choice?
I probably shouldn’t say this, since as an SEO goddess (a title I most humbly claim as my own) I make my living from people worrying about Google, Yahoo! and MSN; but now there’s a kinder, better way to search: GoodSearch.
Powered by Yahoo!, GoodSearch donates a penny per search to the nonprofit organization you designate. If you’re like me, this can amount to a couple of dollars on almost any day! You can use GoodSearch the same way you’d use any other search engine, and your charity or nonprofit of choice will reap the benefits of your research or curiosity.
To get started, just navigate over here: GoodSearch. Enter your favorite charity or nonprofit name into the space that reads “enter your charity here.” And voila!
Stuck on Google? Forget to do the right thing? Make GoodSearch your home page or add it to your web browser toolbar. Either way, you’ll be helping someone … and will find yourself far, far beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Doing the Right Thing, website stuff on November 19th, 2007
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