Beyond the Elements of Style

Courier is Not Your Friend

Okay, I’ve just received the third manuscript in a row formatted in Courier. What are people thinking?

I believe that one of the Writer’s Digest books is still advocating the use of Courier. I hope not, but it must be so, because here it is 2008 and I’m still getting manuscripts formatted in Courier. Fiction, all of them; don’t know if that’s contributing to the problem or not.

People, people, people! Repeat after me: No more Courier! Yes, it looks like a typewriter. Is this supposed to be a good thing? Why on earth would you want to have your manuscript look like it was typed? Do you take pride in still using telephones and cars that must be cranked to get started? Do you light your home with candelabras? Do you shovel coal from your basement into your furnace? Why on earth do you want to use arguably one of the better inventions of recent times –– the computer –– and make it look like you’re not?

Trust me on this one: no one wants to read an entire novel printed in Courier. More to the point, no one wants to read a query letter or a book proposal printed in Courier. It’s difficult to read. It shows that the author really doesn’t know his or her way around a word processing application. It’s old-fashioned (and not in a good way). Did I mention that it’s difficult to read?

So what font should you use? Most people these days recommend Times New Roman. It’s a serif font that is easy to read on paper (and most of you will be submitting on paper). It doesn’t work as well for web pages –– computer viewing is a different affair altogether, one we won’t go into right now –– but for standard writing purposes, Times New Roman is your friend.

Okay: lecture over. And just to show that even Times New Roman has its detractors, read this fun piece in The Big Jewel: Less Popular Fonts Lash Out at Times New Roman.

Welcome to the 21st century, where you’ll be … beyond the elements of stye!

Shipping the Work to India

A recent article in Business Week talks about more and more copyediting being outsourced from Europe and North America to India, because of the lower costs of having editing done there.

It’s not a new issue: faithful readers will remember that I addressed it once already in my post titled Happy Labor Day. But if Business Week has something to say about it, then it’s more of a major issue than it was when I addressed it in 2006.

My friend and colleague, Geoff Hart, has an interesting take on it that I think is absolutely right on:

We’ll never be able to compete with Indian editors on the basis of price, and competing based on quality is unlikely, at least in the long term. Let’s not forget that many Indians are every bit as skilled with English as we are, since it’s often their native language. And with roughly four times the population of North America (and probably a comparable ratio for Europe), there will potentially be four times as many good editors — and four times as many bad ones, of course.

We can offer only two things that Indian editors can’t reliably provide: skill in our local dialect of English, and proximity to our clients. The former is one of those things that translators like to debate, namely whether you can produce prose indistinguishable from that produced by a skilled local. The best translators believe you can, but in my experience (with French), they’re fooling themselves (i.e., judging others based on their own skills). Very few translators can hide their native tongue well enough to fool me. I’ve heard the same observation from several full-time translators whose opinions I respect.

Proximity is no longer such an issue, particularly for those of us who earn more than 90% of our income from clients on other continents whom we’ll never meet. But for some clients, it’s important: they like the ability to phone during regular working hours or request an office visit or otherwise know that we’re available on a moment’s notice. To retain such clients, we need to give top-notch customer service so they have no reason whatsoever to look elsewhere. That’s true of all clients, by the way: the easier we are to work with, the more human nature (i.e., laziness) makes it likely that clients won’t look elsewhere.

Unfortunately, many clients and potential clients see editing as a commodity, and commodities will always be purchased at the lowest price. In the context of this discussion, that means India. These clients aren’t worthy of our time — there are still clients who appreciate our value, and will pay for it. But let’s be realistic: basic copyediting skills, such as fixing subject-verb accords and typos, really are a commodity service. Any editor worthy of the name should be able to fix these problems.

The only thing that allows us to rise above our colleagues and command a premium price is the ability to provide specialized services, and that means we need to find a niche where our expertise is worth the extra money. For me, that’s science editing, and specifically the subset that relates to journal articles written by non-English scientists. I provide heavy substantive and developmental editing (based on 20+ years of working with journals and learning their criteria) along with polishing the language, and for people who need what I provide, a nonspecialist simply can’t compete.

So the question to ask yourself is the following: What do I offer beyond a commodity service? Market that value-add to your clients. It’s no guarantee that you’ll never lose a client to an Indian or other editor with equally specialized skills, but it does reduce the risk.

There’s far more editing work out there than any one group of editors can handle — the trick is to find it. At some point, the amount of editing work required domestically in India will become sufficiently large that Indian editors will begin satisfying the needs of their domestic market first. That should relieve some of the pressure on us Westerners.

Of course, getting from here to there will be difficult. One useful option is to begin capitalizing on another major outsourcing trend, which is seeing much technical writing being shipped to India, where much software and hardware development is going on. (Ditto for China.) All writers need an editor, and for Indian companies (or branches of Western companies) that will be selling their products around the world, localization (culturally sensitive translation) of their documentation will become important. That’s where editors can become extremely useful.

The mills may indeed be closing, but there’s always something you can do with an improved and focused skill-set. Bear that in mind — and visit Geoff online at www.geoff-hart.com. Then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Turkey City Lexicon

(It’s not just for SF fans anymore!)

It has often seemed to me that science fiction writers are the people most at home on the web, the people least surprised by its possibilities, the folks most likely to see its uses. This only makes sense: they are, after all, the ones most at ease with potential technology, spending their days writing coherent stories about complex possible worlds.

So it’s not surprising that they’ve come up with new and different ways to approach issues specific to writing and publishing.

During the early brouhaha over Publish America’s legitimacy (or lack thereof) as a publishing venue, it was a group of science fiction authors who banded together to disprove PA’s claim that it vetted manuscripts by composing a truly awful novel (that did, in fact, get accepted for publication). And it’s science fiction authors who co-host Predators and Editors, which has hopefully helped steer many unwitting authors-to-be in the right direction.

Not new, but not widely known, either, is the Turkey City Lexicon, a site meant to help science fiction writers workshop (or critique) each others’ work by giving them nice packages that say, far better than could any one individual, what might be problematic about a given passage. Named for the Austin, Texas workshop that was the cradle of cyberpunk, the lexicon has gone through a number of different editions (carefully uncopyrighted), and is as hilarious (and as thoughtful) today as it was back in 1988.

Here, for example, we can find Brenda Starr Dialogue (”long sections of talk with no physical background or description of the characters”), the Squid in the Mouth (”the failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author’s remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth”), and the Kudzu Plot (”Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path”).

Much of what is offered in the Lexicon is, in fact, very good advice for anyone writing anything, and I highly recommend reading it, laughing over it, and taking it to heart. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Google Alerts

In the Tools for Writers category, I want to make sure that everyone out there knows about Google Alerts. Indeed, as Google moves forward in its plan for world domination, there are quite a few helpful applications it offers its willing subjects (I love Google Earth, for example), and one of them, Google Alerts, is almost indispensable as a marketing tool, a research tool, and a general find-out-what’s-going-on tool.

Google Alerts––still, surprisingly, in beta––sends you notices any time the keywords you’ve chosen get mentioned on the web. You can input your name as a Google Alert, your book title, or your general topic. I have a Google Alert for the word “stepmother,” for example, since I am one and hope someday to write something about it; it’s a great way to do research and accumulate resources.

If you have something specific you’re looking for, no problem. You can put the title of an article, for example, in quotation marks, and that brings in more results.

And it’s a marvelous marketing tool. When you’re sending out articles or press releases, Google Alerts will tell you where they’re being picked up. You can set up alerts for your name, for clients’ names, for various topics, etc., and it helps you see how successful you marketing efforts are. One other way to use Google Alerts in terms of marketing is to respond to reporters who are writing on topics similar to your own. Often if they just did a story on a topic, they might be willing to do a follow-up. It doesn’t always work, but it’s been fairly effective for me.

There are no limits on the number of Google Alerts you can set up, and they’re fairly easy to terminate at the end of a project or when your interest in a given topic wanes.

To try out Google Alerts for yourself, go here and fill in the form. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

If You Write, Get a Mac!

Okay, at the risk of losing some of you, I have to once again say that if you’re writing — doing any kind of writing — you need to be working with a Mac. End of discussion.

Cost an issue? I always used to tell people that if it costs a little more to get a machine that just works, then it’s worth it. But the reality is that even some years ago Apple was comparable to many pcs when one considered how much the pc user would have to add to her machine to make it comparable to the Mac. And in fact in the past 18 months there have been numerous articles about the many Mac models that are less expensive than many pcs with the same specs. A number of articles can be Googled that compare Dell’s prices for tower pcs, for example, with MacPro towers: they find very often that the Macs come out cheaper. (In some cases, hundreds of dollars cheaper!)

But even putting the cost issues aside, think about what a writer can do with the Leopard operating system:

1. Edit and annotate pdfs from Preview (that’s right, no more need to pay Adobe a small fortune in order to obtain a version of Acrobat that can write to pdfs);
2. Juggle several screens at once (particularly important for those of us whose laptop is our only computer), quickly and seamlessly, using Spaces;
3. Place folders that normally clutter the desktop in the Dock, one of the most wonderful of inventions, ever;
4. Work with Word documents without owning Word through the new TextEdit … and, yes, it exports as a Word doc;

(There’s also a fabulous new personal-use database program available called Bento, though I can’t comment on it, as I’m already pretty much married to the combination of DEVONThink Pro and my ScanSnap document scanner. Let’s hear it for the nearly paperless office!)

All this to say that if you haven’t looked at a Mac lately, you might want to consider it now. You can buy refurbished models at the online Apple Store, and old Macs retain their value to an amazing degree. I upgrade every two years or so by buying a new Mac and selling my old one on eBay … and it rarely costs me more than a few hundred dollars. Seriously. It’s not just a computer, it’s a decent investment. Try doing that with a pc!

I’m not a programmer, and don’t want to have to feel like one. I want my computer to be invisible, intuitive, a non-issue. It happens with a Mac. It just works.

And that pretty much puts me … beyond the elements of style!

The Sky Still Isn’t Falling

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!

Netiquette 101

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!

Google Never Forgets

Help! I’m on the run from children’s Christmas ideas!

Let me note right away that I do not have children. What I do have, however, is a search engine optimization business, and not long ago I did a rather thorough evaluation of a website for a company that features children’s clothing, accessories, and furniture. We did not end up working together, but my computer … remembers.

The reason my computer remembers is because of Google. During the time I was doing this research, my ISP, for reasons unknown to anyone but itself, decided to stop sending my emails. I therefore relied on my Gmail account to correspond with the prospect and work on the website evaluation.

And Google, as we all know, Never Forgets.

So now as I meander around the web, pay-per-click advertising for this company is never far away. I check out the TV schedule and it reminds me about kids’ pajamas. I consider purchasing a book online and it’s right there telling me about a special on children’s dressers. I look into a writing contest and it wants me to pay attention to Christmas décor ideas for the kids’ rooms.

Inanely grinning child models are stalking me as I move through the net, haunting my every click. I want to run screaming from them, but they’re actually intruding into the real world, too. When someone mentioned the company name at a recent party I attended, I started looking around for the hidden microphones.

I could draw some political parallels, of course; but this column isn’t about politics, it’s about words. And today’s cautionary word-related tale? Be careful where and how you use your words, because Google Never Forgets. I’m lucky: I only have child-merchandise pursuing me. But the words you leave out there are there forever. It’s a great reason to think before you type.

Do that, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Check Your Assumptions at the Door, Please

The story is told by Norman MacLean in his posthumously published book Young Men and Fire. On the fifth of August in 1949, fifteen young Forest Service smokejumpers landed at a fire in remote Mann Gulch, Montana. It was supposed to be a “ten o’clock fire” — a fire that would be out by ten o’clock on the morning after the élite squad arrived. It wasn’t. Within an hour, thirteen of them were dead or fatally burned.

They didn’t die because the fire was too hot or too difficult to contain. They didn’t die because of a lack of leadership or a lack of courage. They didn’t die because they were lazy or stupid or unwilling to help each other. They died because they had been trained to deal with fires in one way and one way only, and couldn’t stop thinking of firefighting that way — not even to save their own lives.

This was a grass fire, a fire that burns hotter and faster than the forest fires to which the smokejumpers were accustomed. Suddenly cut off from their escape route, the men had only one option: to outrun a fire moving at seven miles an hour up a 76 percent incline, carrying gear they had been trained never to drop, in heat they had never before experienced.

One person didn’t die and wasn’t burned. His name was Wag Dodge, and he was the crew foreman.

He didn’t die for one reason: he discarded what he thought he “knew” about fighting fires, and he thought of something new. He dropped his heavy gear and set fire to the grass directly in front of him. The new fire spread rapidly uphill and he stepped into the burned area — now a safe zone. He called to the others to join him. They didn’t — and most of them died because of it. (Building an “escape fire” such as the one Wag Dodge improvised at Mann Gulch has now become part of the repertoire of all smokejumpers.)

One of the pieces of equipment keeping the men from running fast enough, the piece they had been trained never to drop, was a combination axe and pick called a Pulaski.

A Pulaski is very useful in a forest fire and completely useless in a grass fire; but it didn’t occur to anyone to drop their Pulaskis in their race against death.

For those of you who thought I’d never get around to writing, breathe a sigh of relief: there is a point to all of this. All of us carry our own Pulaskis; all of us “know” the right way to write, to market our work. But most of us learned to write in a world that doesn’t exist anymore: we had to have, because the world is changing so rapidly. We were trained on forest fires and we’re dealing with grass fires here.

Is it really a good idea to keep carrying a Pulaski?

We “know” certain things about writing just as the smokejumpers “knew” how to deal with fire. We have training. We have experience. Some of us even consider ourselves among the élite in our own niches. But new technology is changing the Internet and the world so rapidly that sometimes it only takes a few months for what we “know” to become obsolete. And then what do we do? What will it take for us to drop our Pulaskis?

History is filled with examples of a better technology vanquishing a less-evolved one. But part of using any new technology is realizing that the old values don’t hold: that assumptions we made based on our experience with one technology do not necessarily translate into the new one. Along with Wag Dodge, we have to think of something new.

Do you have any Pulaskis you can drop… now? You’ll be beyond the elements of style!

What’s Your (Subject) Line?

Is it just me, or is it becoming more and more difficult these days to find appropriate subject lines for emails?

The old spammers used to be obvious, urging us in the subject lines of their emails to get thin, to get more girth, to obtain medications, to watch porn flicks. But these days they’re becoming more subtle (not to mention, on occasion, more lyrical), and it’s not just in deleting them that this is causing a problem.

For example, I needed to contact a client the other week. “Project proposal,” I wrote in the subject line of the email. I frowned; I’d received a couple of spam missives just that week with just that subject line. “Your project proposal” was worse. “Customline Wordware Project Proposal” worked, at least for now, but I know enough to realize that it won’t be long before my company name, too, is usurped. Already I’m getting very racy invitations indeed from … myself.

Or there’s the message that my own email program threw into the trash, the note from a prospective client that had as its subject line: “your question.” Right.

Aside from wondering how many friends I’ve disgruntled and how many potential clients I’ve lost due to overactive spam filters that never delivered messages to their intended recipients, I’m getting close to a point where my creativity just isn’t up to the task. What subject line is descriptive yet clearly not spam?

And if you can find one, how much longer will it be so?

We all complain about spam, but in some ways it’s part of the reality of life on the Net; and the advantages of being there, to me, far outweigh the inconveniences of spam. I can live with it if it’s the price I pay to read journals, submit essays or short stories, transact business, communicate with friends and family, and keep up-to-date with news.

I just wish I could find a subject line I can use! At that point I’ll be … beyond the elements of style!