Notes On Writing: The Printed Page Is Meant To Be Printed Out
Inspired by this piece -- "Not My Type" -- on the Chronicle of Higher Education, Virginia Postrel posted on Facebook:
I haven't tried switching typography, but it's an interesting idea. I do read aloud when I can (rarely for columns, often for my book-in-progress) and edit with a pencil on paper.
A quote from that Chronicle piece by Rachel Toor:
For some perverse reason, my version of Microsoft Word defaults to an unattractive sans-serif typeface for a new document. It also adds a space between paragraphs--something that drives me nuts. While I've been able to change those quirks on my home computer, my tiny laptop will not let me reset the default.
She usually resets it (I have a page formatted page set up that I open) but one day, she didn't:
And something funny happened. Without the familiar presentation, my writing looked strange to me. I saw my sentences from a distance, as if someone else had created them. It excited me enough to keep writing. When I went back to revise, the distance provided by the novelty of the presentation allowed me to read and edit with a freshness that I hadn't felt for a while.I suppose I should have realized that this would happen. Often when I read my own published work it feels unfamiliar. Sometimes I think, "Wow, this is pretty good." Sometimes I cringe and notice flaws and failures that had been invisible to me in the draft on my own computer.
Distance from our own prose serves an important purpose. Usually we get it in a temporal way, allowing manuscripts to lie fallow in desk drawers (in the old days) or now in unopened documents, for however long it takes to come to the work with a fresh focus. When we spend too long revising and messing around with the language, we tend to memorize our own sentences, which can give them a ring of inevitability. That can make them hard to edit, or to jettison.
When we're in the process of creating, we often add ideas, anecdotes, or data that don't really belong. In early drafts, that can be a good thing. The first draft is the get-it-down draft. It's where you get to throw in anything that might turn out to be useful or important. But until you've let a piece of writing sit long enough, it can be difficult to discern the essential from the self-indulgent because everything, when newly minted, looks shiny and good. Just getting words on the page seems like an accomplishment.
When I see the work printed out, the experience of reading is different. Lines that on the screen seemed perfectly fine can no longer hide their clunkiness. I notice flabby descriptions and ugly adverbs I had overlooked. I see when paragraphs are too long and the work looks uninviting, or when they are so uniform that the writing appears dull and boring even at a quick glance. Similar sentence constructions become more apparent to me on the printed page and seem easier to change. When the work is in one continuous scroll, I'm less likely to be able to see the whole piece. It helps to lay pages next to each other and see how they fit together. That is, after all, how the reader will experience them, at least when they appear in printed publications.
I wrote on Virginia's Facebook post:
Microsoft is uniquely unintuitively designed. But, related to the piece, I MUST print my stuff out to read it. To edit my weekly syndicated column, after it's first done, I tape it on my bathroom wall and edit it while I'm in the shower. Something about being out of a "proper" writing environment gives me insight that I don't have while seated at my desk.
When I've finished a book, or some important chapters, I go to a bar I love near my house at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, sit down with a glass of wine, and proofread. I just finished the telephone chapter of my book. Basically. I have some fiddling to do, but in a few days, it'll be bar-time, and then I can see anything I've missed.
On a related note (per something Toor says in her piece), here's why you shouldn't be worried about "wasting" paper.
It's micro$oft. They know what you want.
My favorite quirk right now is clicking on 'New' in Word doesn't bring up a new document. It brings up a selection box which offers a 'blank document' or a 'blank blog post' and there is no way to set this back to default to just open a new document.
Thanks, Bill!
DrCos at March 7, 2012 4:08 AM
I found the earlier versions of Microsoft products pretty logically laid out and intuitive. Now that they're trying to copy Apple on everything, it's become a farce.
I like Apple products (own several), but their office software is the Fisher Price version.
That's because Apple does it that way. When you begin a new Notes document, it offers you templates.
People who can't (or don't want to) lay out their own douments love templates. iWorks is silly with templates.
DrCos - Use the small blank document icon in the Quick Access Toolbar and you'll get a blank document automatically opened each time.
Conan the Grammarian at March 7, 2012 9:00 AM
This is so true. My daughter has reached an age where she is starting to write actual essays. I always tell her to print and then read for content. There is something about the screen that keeps you from REALLY seeing what you wrote.
Also, I agree that early verions of Word were much better than what we have now. I really don't need it to think for me. I know what I want my document to look like and I don't need it to tell me which format to use. I find overriding its little prompts VERY frustrating.
sheepmommy at March 7, 2012 10:24 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2012/03/07/type.html#comment-3044113">comment from sheepmommyThe program I love, that has probably improved my ability to put complex science in my work, is Scrivener. It's absolutely incredible, and I think it's only $45.
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
Every person I've shown this to has fallen weeping at my feet thanking me for it a month or so later. Basically.
Amy Alkon
at March 7, 2012 10:26 AM
MS Word's user interface has always been counter-intuitive to me. Nothing is ever where I expect to find it. And there are bugs which have been in there across several major revisions, and I don't know why they can't fix them. After all these years, if you use outline numbering of headers, you still have to fix all the numbering manually every time you insert a sub-header.
I will say, though, that I'm intrigued by some of the user interface concepts that I'm seeing talked up for Windows 8. They are finally eliminating the Start menu, which has always been a bottleneck. If they get it right, it will make working with it much simpler once one learns the interface.
Cousin Dave at March 7, 2012 4:09 PM
My goodness, this is silly.
You can place an alias or shortcut of the template you want in the Taskbar or the Dock and click on it.
When you're done, Save As... {new doc name, in the Documents or My Documents folder} and repeat as necessary. That way you don't modify the template.
In case you haven't noticed, Word/Office is bristling with things you DO NOT NEED AND SHOULD NOT USE if all you're going to do is recipes and letters to Grandma. It will embed live Excel tables with Fourier transforms and save them as movies, translate to other languages, e-mail and hotlink from anywhere in any document in Office...
Spend ALL of your time with it, and after a year you'll still discover new stuff. Oh, yeah, you can use Visual Basic to modify its macros to {insert task here}. It automatically configures fonts every time you open it, and it "heals" itself if you're missing some.
Hint: it's a big program, and Office is a big suite, and not for nothing. You bought an aircraft carrier. It has a small boat, but if that's all you wanted you bought the wrong program.
Use WordPad. Save as .rtf. You'll be fine. And it came with your PC.
Radwaste at March 7, 2012 4:22 PM
"After all these years, if you use outline numbering of headers, you still have to fix all the numbering manually every time you insert a sub-header."
Although the method differs with the version of Office, this isn't true for Office XP. There are several (dozen) tutorials around, but basically it comes down to setting Bullets And Numbering preferences in the Options pulldown and numbering in that manner.
Radwaste at March 7, 2012 4:25 PM
I have always set my Word to show the hidden characters, etc. I also set my default font to be Arial.
I don't know how many documents I have received over the years that I can tell the alignment issues, etc. are caused by the end-user not having a clue how their software or computer works.
Somethings people don't understand: other than Courier and a few others, most fonts are proportional. The width of a space and a character vary. A <Tab> character and five spaces are not equal.
Most Office products are like a combined Nimitz class Aircraft Carrier and the USS Missouri (BB-63) battleship. Typing a note in Word is the equivalent of using a hammer to kill an ant.
The 2007/2010 ribbon just leaves me cold. All the features needed to do what ever you needed were really there in Office 2003. They just weren't easily/directly available without some customization of Word, or other office apps. But that took some thought and training for the end-user.
And my addendum: Many people would rather die than think or ask a question; in fact, most do.
Jim P. at March 7, 2012 10:21 PM
I miss the old [Reveal Codes] command in WordPerfect. That simple command was the only advantage that old clunker had over MS Word back in the day, but it was a big one.
[Reveal Codes] allowed me to see each formatting change as if I was typing HTML and make adjustments to my document accordingly.
I could move text outside the command codes and avoid many of the annoying idiosyncrasies described in this thread that still plague MS Word to this day.
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The carrier-to-rowboat analogy for MS Office is a good one.
MS Office programs are intended to function at a fairly high level and seamlessly integrate with other programs and data sources - even the non-Microsoft ones.
[Note: The Mac versions of Office lack some of the functionality and cross-platform capabilities of the Windows versions.]
The problem is that, at the same time that MS Office is trying to be the end-all-be-all of systems integration, it is also trying to be so simple, a novice can use it for basic household typing and record-keeping activities.
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I used to frequently interview people for financial analyst positions and almost every candidate was an "advanced" Excel user.
When I asked them to rate their expertise on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being "can find the icon" and 10 being "wrote the code," they invariably told me they were an 8.
However, when I asked them to tell me about the VBA macros they've written of tell me the built-in financial, statistical, or analytical functions they'd used, I got a blank look.
They actually didn't know how powerful the program was and thought that because they had mastered "=(C1+C3)/C2" that they'd mastered the program.
Conan the Grammarian at March 8, 2012 10:26 AM
"[Note: The Mac versions of Office lack some of the functionality and cross-platform capabilities of the Windows versions.]"
This sounds weird for two reasons. One, at the other end of the term "cross-platform" is...
And two, I have a ridiculous time getting cut/paste to work across apps in XP. Not so in OS X, even though the apps Apple offers are much less compatible and WYSIWYG than they used to be (and I have Excel 0.0B (!), Taste 1.0 and Switcher in the cabinet, gathering dust).
Everybody knows there is money to be made in confusion. At work, we do desktop documents without even starting to approach the capabilities of a 20-year-old Mac IIci - which we used to use before someone got paid to expose us to Y2K gyrations. That's government-controlled computing for you.
Radwaste at March 8, 2012 2:54 PM
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