Writing That Works, 3e_ How to Communicate Effectively in Business - Kenneth Roman [12]
3 “I Love My Computer”
The process of writing and editing on a computer, especially for anyone who started life on a typewriter, is so pleasurable that it elicits the kind of affection many people feel for a new car or some other precious possession. It’s so fast and effortless to change a word, add a point, delete a sentence, move a paragraph. The practices we advocate in this book turn out to be easy, even fun.
Even those few still attached to their typewriters may soon find their clickety-clack days coming to an end. Author Tom Wolfe told an interviewer that his novel A Man in Full would be his last typewritten work, but not because he had fallen in love with a computer. He couldn’t get his typewriter fixed any more.
In his excellent book On Writing Well, William Zinsser calls the PC “God’s gift, or technology’s gift, to good writing.” But marvelous as these devices are, it’s worth keeping in mind that they are machines and not magicians. They will not miraculously change a bad writer into a good one. They can even entrench a couple of the worst practices of bad writers, by making it so easy to send out half-baked material.
Most computers have dazzling charms for the writer. There’s a good thesaurus, under Tools. There are templates for memos, business letters — anything you write repeatedly — that preset font, paper size, margins, as established by you. This saves a lot of time. Other tools allow you to do all sorts of useful things with page numbers, footnotes, inserts, section headings. You can get a word count in two seconds.
In the rest of this chapter we will run through the ways you can enlist your computer in your efforts to write well. And we’ll put up a few warning signs to help you avoid the hazards that computers can throw in front of you.
How to Use Your Computer in Writing
There are as many ways to write on a computer as there are personal habits of writing. One writer likes to go back and correct after every paragraph or two, another roars through an entire draft without pause. No two people will find exactly the same set of practices suitable for their individual turns of mind. Your own proclivities will steer you toward what’s best for you.
Longtime users, however, are in broad agreement on the merits of a number of procedures. Among them:
1. Write first, format later
Formatting is not writing. Playing with the details of the appearance of your paper can distract you from grappling with its content.
On the other hand, if you don’t want your draft to be a shapeless jumble, it’s a good idea to work from an outline — and to do just enough formatting at the outset to make your structure visible.
The drafter of this chapter, for instance, formatted the headings and subheadings — all from his outline — as he typed the first rough version. This kept his thoughts in order as he went along. But going counter to his own advice, he also fiddled with indents and put the numbers and subheadings into boldface. They looked nice on the screen but wasted time and interrupted his train of thought.
2. Practice the Rule of More Than One
With computers, you have to be paranoid about saving your file. Never have just one copy of whatever you’re working on; make sure there is a second copy — somewhere. Hard drives can crash, floppy disks are not forever. The authors save everything that is important on disks and print hard copies as well.
Get to know the AutoSave feature (found in Tools/Options), and set it to save your document at least every 15 minutes. Power surges, input errors, and other obliterators of your work are far from theoretical hazards.
We’re also getting religion about running weekly virus checks. We let it go for a few months recently, and discovered forty-five viruses on our computer — and more than a hundred on our assistant’s. Companies that used to catch a major virus every quarter now find one almost every day.
How often you make a hard copy of your rough draft depends on the length and importance