 |
Me on Flickr |
 |
Me on |
Book: Plastic Viking Helmets
Coming back soon:
Virtual Adam
Introduction
Do you have green fingers? typing skills considered
Preparing the ground background research
Planting the seeds getting ready to plan
The green shoots a plan
Feeding and watering developing the plan
Weeding working on the first go
Useful tools: helpful features in the word processor
Style individualism in writing
Pests and diseases dangers and problems with word processor writing
The harvested crop an example essay
Useful tools
Here are some of the WP features which I find most useful. I'm sure most WP software has these. Some will have additional ones that are useful. Explore your manual, or find other users of your software, there might be some good tips.
Copy/cut/paste:
These are the functions which allow you to move bits of text around, so that you don't have to delete something and re-type it just because you change your mind about where it ought to be. In a Windows or Apple Mac system you can usually 'drag and drop' with a mouse, which achieves the same thing.
This is the option to use a single key to type in a whole phrase. In some WPs they can be stored as 'macros'. My feeling is that there aren't many word combinations which occur often enough in academic essays to make storing them worthwhile. However, sometimes there is one which is going to come up a lot in one particular essay, so it might be worth making it a temporary phrase, eg 'petite bourgeoisie'. I don't do this, though, for just one essay, I use replace. On the Amstrad PCW all temporary stored phrases are lost when you switch off the machine, which means if you don't do the complete essay in one session you have to re-enter them every time. In Word and WordPerfect you could store them on disk, but unless you are very methodical and delete them after use you will have lots of mostly useless macros building up.
Perhaps more useful, particularly on the Amstrad PCWs, is using stored phrases to store codes that you use a lot, eg underline and italic codes for titles. When stored in a phrase in your preferred combination these are quite convenient to use. Word and WordPerfect use 'styles' to do this kind of thing.
Search and replace (or exchange):
'Search' is the facilty to look for all instances of a particular word (or part word, or collection of words). It's a good way of quickly getting to a specific point in the essay. It's also a good way of finding reminder notes that you wrote to yourself in the essay.
'Replace' (or 'exchange') is the option which seeks all occurrences of a word or phrase in the document, and swaps them for something else.
I use this to help with a long or difficult phrase or word which is going to occur a lot in an essay. For example, 'humanistic psychology'. What I do is to type 'HP' instead all the way through, then at the end swap all the 'HP's for the real thing using 'replace'. Remember to use a combination of letters which is not likely to occur elsewhere, or you might end up with 'TOOThumanistic psychologyICK'.
Be careful with 'replace' options. Some versions look only for whole words, but if not it is wise to include spaces around your search word. If you wanted to change all occurrences of 'cat' to 'feline' you could end up talking about a 'felinech 22 situation'. This is avoided if you exchange '[SPACE]cat[SPACE]' for '[SPACE]feline[SPACE]', though it will miss 'cats' so you might have to run it again to get the plurals. You should use a 'confirm each exchange' option if you have one.
Spell chequers:
Spell checkers are useful, but must be used with care. They should add to, not replace, human checking.
The problem with the electronic checkers is that they know how words are spelt, but not what words mean, so they let you get away with things like:
"Here care is four sail butt my fiend does knot wont two by it."
when you mean:
"Her car is for sale but my friend does not want to buy it."
All the mistakes are genuine words, but not the ones intended. A spell checker would not find any errors.
They also do nothing about poor grammar. It is always worth reading through for errors yourself, or getting a friend (or fiend?) to check for you.
Grammar checkers:
Some word processors include grammar checking. At their present state of development I think they are of limited use because they are slow and produce a lot of false alarms and miss genuine errors. In time they may become more useful. If you have one, have a try and see if you find the results worth the effort and time.
My grammar checker found only two problems with the "My care is four sail butt my fiend does knot wont two by it." sentence; the "butt" and "wont". Everything else it passed through. Its suggested replacement for "wont" was "won't" not "want", and the advice for "butt" I didn't understand.
They are quite good at finding long sentences, and commenting on your writing style.
Page layout, headers and footers:
If you haven't already, it is worth setting up a standard document format for your essays. You can set up document templates for this. If you don't know how to do these things, do you have a friend who could set them up for you? Once set up, they are very easy to use.
If you really want to make the most of this concept, you can record a macro and link it to the template. A macro can be clever (if you know how to do this) by asking you for information specific to this essay which it them integrates into the header etc. Not for the novice, though.
Your layout should follow any rules about margin sizes etc, and you can use the facility to automatically print things at the tops and bottoms of pages (headers and footers) to include the page numbers, your name, course and personal identifier on each page.
Word counters:
For assessed essays it is very useful to be able to count words quickly and accurately, because you are normally working to word limits. The time to use this feature is not when you have produced your first draft and you want to know how far out you have drifted, but after each sub section of your essay. If your counter will count specific sections of text then this is perfect (usually achieved by selecting the required text before starting the count).
With this facility you really can 'grow' your essay. With a little planning you can decide how long each section ought to be before you write any of it. You could include this information in your plan on the WP. Then you can monitor the length of the essay as it progresses. For example, you might decide that 100 words is the most you can allow for the introduction. So, when you have written your introduction, and it is 150 words long, you can decide whether to juggle the rest to accommodate the extra (dangerous: you might go over elsewhere too) or start chopping something out straight away (safer). If you do this for each section it is much better than finishing a 1000 word essay and finding it is 500 words too long. I think this kind of length planning is a good discipline to foster, and the WP facilitates it.
Line numbering:
This option lets you add numbers down the left margin of your page. These can be useful for a tutor to refer to sections when marking. This is especially useful if the tutor gives comments on a separate piece of paper rather than writing on your script. The tutor can say "page 2 line 15" rather than "page 2 the bit where you define ....".
Eventually you will get a feel for the package which you use. For example, get to know how many words (roughly) fit on a page. I usually find that a thousands words takes up about 8K on disk. These rules of thumb can be useful.