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Don’t Let the Software Bork Your Writing!

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By ERic CHLEBEK
STAFF WRITER 4

If you work in an academic or
business field today, as a student,
teacher, mover, shaker, or even if
you're a mere secretary taking
memos, something you might
want to know is that your com-
puter’s software is screwing with
you.

It doesn’t mean to; the Word
Processing Value Pak that you got
with your $699 PC from Dell was
probably programmed with the
very best of intentions Well,
maybe not the very best.

Let’s.agree that the intentions
were good enough to have you
producing documents relatively
easily and quickly, using your
pre-existing abilities as a writer,
typist, or whatever it is you’re
schilling yourself as these days.

Now, computers have been
used to create documents, both
professionally and not-so-profes-
sionally, since the technology was
available. Common folk have
been using them to produce doc-
uments for two decades now.

You would think the master-
minds at Microsoft, Sun, IBM,
Corel, Lotus, Xerox, Adobe, and
Apple would have figured out
something foolproof by now.
However, in my opinion, drawn
from my experiences with word
processing software dating back
to Works 2.0 for DOS, things are
not getting better.

In fact, they suck. Microsoft
Office (and more specifically,
Word) has been getting steadily
worse for the better part of 10
years, and although things should
be improving, they are not.

People are not getting their
work done quickly and efficiently,
and they aren’t doing a very good

job of it either. That’s what is
really the problem here.

If we were to believe the hype
from the (now. single) manufac-
turer of this type of software, we
should be. accomplishing more,
in less time. This would seeming=
ly justify the massive price tag of
Office/Word, which most people
end up pirating anyways, stu-
dents and professionals alike.

“There was edit-
ing. Big red pens
writing big red
obscenities next to ~
horrendous gram-
matical errors.”

However, it seems to me that
people these days are leaning on
software to do their work for
them, and are disappointed when
the results are not up to their
expectations.

Here is the crux of the issue. It
is not actually Microsoft’s fault,
or any other developer of a word
processing suite. They are trying
their best to deliver what people
want in a software product.

Micwsoft’s extremely well
funded marketing and R&D divi-
sions undoubtedly discovered
that people actually want crutch-
es like letter templates, grammar
checkers (that don’t work),
“Clippy”, et al.

If you haven’t clued in by now:
it’s your fault, and there are a
multitude of reasons for this,
depending on individual people.

Maybe you’re just-lazy. Maybe
you have forgotten those lessons
that were drilled into your head

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by the public school system.
Maybe you're just plain incom-
petent.

As a writer, you should hold
what you have produced in the
highest regard, and treat it with
the utmost care. You should.
proofread it, not merely once, but
as many times as it takes to satis-
fy you that is is free of errors; of
both spelling and grammatical
types. Then, you should have it

reviewed and critiqued by a,

friend or colleague before final
submission. :

Running a pass with the “Spell
Checker” is not guaranteed to
fixed everything, or even any-
thing, and you can forget about
even using the grammar checker
in Word.

The fact of the matter is, com-
puters can’t parse English the
way people can. They can’t
detect your errors for you, so

don’t even try to use them to do ~

that.

“Hey!” you say. “You don’t
know me man. I’m a good writer.
You should have seen the stuff I
was pulling out of my ass in the
seventh grade My teacher.
thought I was a freaking savant.”

Well, that may be so, but now
that Teach isn’t around to force
you to check your work, edit your
drafts, and tell you what the word
“superfluous” actually means, is
your work still quality?

Do you pay more attention to
what you're saying, or more
attention to what font you’re
going to use in your document?
Do you focus on substance, or
making the double spaces really,
really big to feign depth?

Modern word processing soft-

-ware has eliminated the draft,

and this has been detrimental to

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the way people produce docu-
ments.

It used to be that in the days
before word processors, people
were forced to make draft copies.
Whether by hand or with the aid
of a typewriter, people had to
worry about substance before
type-setting. After the draft was
reviewed, it would be published,
printed, or put in the trash.

There was editing. Big red
pens writing big red obscenities
next to horrendous grammatical
errors. :

Now, in the age of modernity,
we callously spew forth the con-
tents of our mental heap onto the
page, giving little care to what
we're saying, who we’re saying it
to, or what our purpose is. We’re
more concerned with getting the
formatting just right.

After all, since you’re such a
good writer, the only thing keep-
ing you from getting your resume
picked by a hiring executive is the
lousy formatting on your other-
wise flawless -ego manifesto.

I know not everyone is a “com-
puter nerd”, though I can’t see
why you need to be anything of
the sort to ‘use a computer, so
here are a few pointers on how to
produce documents more wisely
on your operating system of
choice. ;

Every operating system ever
released, except ones that you
don’t need to know about, has a
text editor.

In Windows, it’s called
notepad.exe, and it’s located in
the Accessories folder In Mac
OS X, it’s called TextEdit.app,
and it’s located in _ the

Applications section in your
Finder. :

I heartily recommend using
these simple, free text utilities for
creating the first draft of your

document. They have no spell
checking, they have no grammar
checking, they have no format-
ting capabilities, bold, italic, or
otherwise. All they do is take
‘what you type into the keyboard
and put it on the screen.

If you’re submitting an article
to, say, a student newspaper, after
you create what is called an

- ASCII text file (with a -txt file

extension) you’re already done.
Proofread it, then email it to the
poor sucker who has to read your
lethargic illuminations.

If you need to hand in your
work to your professor, who
expects a clean, double spaced
hard copy document, open up
your saved text file in Word, or if
you can’t justify the cost,
OpenOffice (which is free for all
operating systems}. From there,
you can apply whatever format-
ting you like.

You can even run the spell
checker and snicker as it picks up
all the Canadian/British spelling
you've used. Then, you can: be
smug and smarmy, knowing full
well that you are smarter than
the machine.

If you really want to get fancy,
you can format your document
with QuarkXPress, InDesign, or
even LaTeX.

Today’s writers are standing
on the shoulders of the world’s
greatest literary and journalistic
minds. With current technology
and information systems, poten-
tial authors have more resources
than ever before. More refer
ences, more pearls of insight,
more ease of use.

Our young generations will
either learn to swim in this sea of
information, or they will drown.
Make sure that you, as a writer,
provide a good example for
them.

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