I loved this book. Saller, senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press and editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q&A, has assembled a wealth of useful information and observation based on her experiences. Each chapter starts with a Q and ends with the corresponding A. The main body of the chapter is made up of musings, advice, rules and anecdotes relevant to the theme. And it’s peppered with recommendations of other texts, websites and tools that the author has found useful. It’s beautifully written, and a good humoured, gentle, easy read. Continue reading “The Subversive Copy Editor by Carol Fisher Saller”
Tag: Word
Do not spellcheck!
Generally speaking, you should spellcheck everything you write. Word has some fairly decent in-built spelling and grammar checking, and while it may not get everything, it’ll catch a lot. However, on occasion, there’s content you really don’t want to spellcheck. Case in point: API/developer documentation rife with code samples: yes, I did mean to spell it that way; yes, it is all one word; no, I don’t want to capitalise that just because it’s at the start of a line; no, I don’t want a space after that semi-colon… And by the time you’ve hit Ignore for the umpteenth time in a row, you realise you’re back in body text, and you’re not sure how long you’ve been on auto-pilot clicking Ignore, and who knows what garbage you’ve said is ok to leave as is now, and you may as well go right back to page 1 and start over. So what do you do? Forego spellchecking entirely? Copy and paste the non-code-sample bits to a separate doc, spellcheck, then merge back in? Or magically tag the code samples as not to be spellchecked and live happily ever after? It’s a leading question, I admit it. The last option it is, and today’s post is on how to do just that! Continue reading “Do not spellcheck!”
Useful website with many tech writing tips and tricks
I’ve often found myself trying to figure out the solution to a problem in Framemaker, RoboHelp, or Word, and eventually wound up on a forum or page where the wonderful Peter Grainge has supplied the solution. His website – http://www.grainge.org/ – is a carefully curated treasure trove of tricks and fixes to get around a million problems tech writers encounter every day – I don’t know why I don’t just head straight there more often. I’d highly recommend you take a peek if you’ve never visited before.
Creating keyboard shortcuts in Word
When using software, some people like to point-and-click, others like to stick to the keyboard. If you’re in the latter camp, then you’ve probably encountered a handful of menu/toolbar/ribbon buttons with no keyboard shortcut in various pieces of software. Microsoft Word helpfully allows you to assign your own shortcuts to functions with no current shortcut, or to re-assign the shortcut for a function if the default doesn’t fit your reflexes! Continue reading “Creating keyboard shortcuts in Word”
Changing the default Paste options in Word
Remember Clippy? “It looks like you’re writing a letter”? Well, Clippy may be gone, but Word still has his attitude. If Word thinks it recognises a pattern in what you’re doing, it’ll do its damnedest to leap in and lend a helpful hand. For a novice user, this might(?) be helpful; for those of us who’ve been around the block a few times and have very particular notions about what we want, it can be a royal pain. There are ways to curb/tweak Word’s helpfulness, though, if you go digging through the settings. My particular bug bear is when copied-and-pasted text misbehaves, merging itself into existing lists and tables when I don’t want it to, or taking on some wild and wonderful formatting characteristics. Tweaking the behaviour of copy-and-paste in Word is the topic of today’s blog post. Continue reading “Changing the default Paste options in Word”