(Okay, so it probably isn’t the last word in the Grand Scheme of Things, but it is for this week, anyway…)
Thanks to Geoff Hart, whom you have encountered in these virtual pages before, you can enjoy this –– er –– humorous take on the fonts debacle.
They’re way beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Tools, About Writing on July 22nd, 2008
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
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!
Posted in Books, Tools, Technology on July 20th, 2008
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!
Posted in Publicity, Tools, Creativity, Technology on June 19th, 2008
I want to post a very short note today for both readers and authors, alerting you (should you not already know about it) to the online presence of Book Tour, where, as the tagline would have it, “authors and audiences meet.”
Book Tour is a free online clearinghouse for information about authors who are touring. It was started by Chris Anderson, the author of NYT bestseller The Long Tail, who knows a thing or two about marketing.
If you’re a reader, you can sign up to be alerted when authors visit your local booksellers. If you’re an author, you can list all of your appearances, show a picture of your latest book cover, and other nice perks.
From the Book Tour website:
As the world’s largest, 100% free directory of author events, BookTour.com makes book tours better.In just a few minutes any author can create a page showcasing their biography, books, and upcoming engagements. Listing new events is as easy as answering a few questions. Publishers, booksellers, and events managers can upload tour dates en masse using a simple Excel spreadsheet.
Most importantly, readers can peruse our database of author events for the best of what’s nearby, or they can track their favorite authors on tour.
Readers can invite faraway authors to their town, or get in touch with authors already scheduled to appear locally to address additional groups, from company speaker series to book group meetings.
For authors, BookTour.com serves as a one-stop tool for book promotion, allowing authors at all levels of their careers to locate receptive live audiences.
For readers and audiences, BookTour.com makes finding when a favorite author is coming to your town as easy as checking the weather.
BookTour is based in San Francisco, the city that buys more books (and wine) per capita than any in America.
Check out Book Tour, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Publicity, Books, Tools, The Writing Life, Reading on May 22nd, 2008
Google anything, and chances are the first page of results will come up with a Wikipedia article. And it’s an incredibly quick and convenient way to look things up, there’s no question about that. I was reading an article that referenced Langrangian points, and the Wikipedia article (first in Google’s search returns) explained them in language that was accessible to a non-scientist like me. So far, so good.
There’s a catch, of course. As you probably know, anyone can write or edit a Wikipedia entry. That leaves a lot of room for erroneous and/or biased information to be included in any of the thousands of entries. And, yes, readers are encouraged to edit entries, either to correct mistakes or to add information not already there, the hope being that slanted material and inaccurate material will eventually get sifted out.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And we tend to get seduced by the former, and ignore the latter.
Besides all that, thinking about Wikipedia raises the perennial issue of web anonymity. It’s been observed that, when shielded by anonymity, people will say and do things that they’d probably never dream of doing were their real name associated with the statement or act. We see this all over the web: some anonymous users are trolls, some are hateful, some are probably dangerous (as we saw with the horrible threats made to a female IT blogger last year). None are very nice. Just as people seem to morph into the lowest common denominator when in groups, so too do they seem to lose all civility and accountability when posting anonymously on the web.
What does this have to do with Wikipedia? Plenty, when you stop to realize that edits can be made anonymously there. Imagine the individual with an axe to grind and plenty of time on his hands, and you can imagine what havoc can be wreaked … and we’re not talking chatrooms here, we’re talking about a site that is perceived by many (including Google) as an authority site.
CIT graduate student Virgil Griffith did us all a service, I think, when he coded and released a tool called Wikiscanner; it allows one to see who has been editing Wikipedia entries anonymously. When Wikiscanner first came out, the expectation around the net was that the annymous posters who were furtively changing articles were what journalist Annalee Newitz has referred to as “some blogger writing in his basement in his pajamas.” Not so, as it turned out: Big Names were involved. As Newitz noted in a 2007 article on AlterNet:
“Turns out that all the anonymous propagansa nad lies on Wikipedia aren’t coming from basement dwellers at all––they’re coming from Congress, the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the ACLU. Somebody at Halliburton deleted key information from an entry on war crimes; Diebold, an electronic-voting machine manufacturer, deleted sections of its entry about a lawsuit filed against it. Someone at Pepsi deleted information about health problems caused by the soft drink. (…) And of course, the CIA has been editing the entry on the Iraq war.”
So there it is. The political ramifications of this discovery can be discussed ad infinitum, ad nauseaum, but the point for this particular blog (which is, after all, about words) is this: check out biases before you’re quick to see a source as authoritative. I recently edited two books that relied on Wikipedia for their source material, and had to have very long, very candid discussions with the authors over the wisdom of using something that is in many ways a moving target, to back up one’s points.
Don’t trust the net. It’s a fabulous tool but it can take over one’s thinking very quickly and very insidiously. When you receive a chain email, check Snopes before forwarding it to 346 of your closest friends. And use Wikipedia as a beginning for your research … but never as an end.
And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Tools, Process Matters, About Writing, Words on May 15th, 2008
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:
(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!
Posted in Tools, Technology on May 9th, 2008
Just a quick thought today for those of you who may be looking for work (and if you’re like me, you’re always thinking about the next gig, no matter how terrific the one you’re doing now may be).
Anyway, something you may not have considered is the blogosphere. You probably know blogs for their literary, political, or professional content, but did you know that some blogs post gigs for freelancers? All you need to do is make a list of tags that fit your criteria (for example, depending on your freelance specialization, you might use writer, editor, SEO marketing, publishing, etc.).
Here are a few blog search engines you can try:
And while you’re at it, make sure that you add your blog to their listings!
Using all the resources available to you is the best way to get work –– and keep getting it. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Submissions, Tools, About Writing on May 1st, 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
It comes up in working with clients and students alike, and over the holidays my stepdaughter asked me when to use “whom” versus “who” in writing. (There was no point in asking which ought to be used in speaking: she is thirteen, and firmly entrenched in the Sullen Adolescent Communication Syndrome, which appears to involve much more grunting, hissing, and gesturing than it does actual words.)
I gave Anastasia my standard explanation, after which she said, “huh?”
So here is my who/whom cheatsheet: for Anastasia, for students, for clients, for anyone who needs it: don’t think in terms of rules, think in terms of substitution.
And the general usage is, if you can substitute “she” for the troublesome word in the sentence, you should use “who.” If you can substitute “her,” the word should be “whom.”
Here’s an example: “Who/whom was supposed to walk the dog this morning?” Make it a statement: would you say, “She was supposed to walk the dog this morning,” or “Her was supposed to walk the dog this morning”? Clearly she; clearly who.
“To whom/whom were you speaking?” can easily be answered: “I was speaking to her,” therefore, “whom” is the correct word in that context.
There’s nothing wrong with a grammatical cheatsheet, as long as it points the user to better grammar usage! And by now I’m hoping that it will help Anastasia be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Tools, About Writing, Grammar, Words on December 29th, 2007