Gordon Woolf's Blog

How quickly do you reply to emails?

I have to admit that I tend to be tardy in replying to emails. Though I will reply quickly if I have to, I usually like to think about many replies and often, for the more complex replies, the response will come overnight or while relaxing with my tablet or a physical book.

However, I was somewhat concerned by a comment on a forum that people should not expect emails to receive a quick response "because they would not have got a quick reply when correspondence was by letter and what is now called snail mail."

I have memories of more than one mail delivery in a day and to a term that has now fallen out of use: "Please reply by return of post". Then an Agatha Christie mystery on TV had a plot which depended on a letter sent in the morning being delivered that evening, so I decided to find out a little more.

It seems that in cities such as London and New York the postman could go by each address as many as 12 times in a day and it was common to expect a reply "by return of post" meaning an expectation of delivery within a couple of hours and of a response a couple of hours after that.

Randall Stross covered the subject well in the New York Times back in 2010: The birth of cheap communications (and junk mail)

He states: "And, not unlike us, most Victorian letter writers seemed more concerned about getting a rapid response than a long one. 'Return of post' was an often-used phrase, requesting an immediate response, in time for the next scheduled delivery that day."

The real revolution in mail occurred not with email but with the penny post of Victorian times, well covered by Catherine J. Golden
 in her book "Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing" published by University Press of Florida.

This revolution soon spread to many other countries and letter writing came within the reach of just about anyone in society. Unfortunately, as a reviewer of this book commented, "Indeed, the revolution in letter writing of the nineteenth century led to blackmail, frauds, unsolicited mass mailings, and junk mail--problems that remain with us today."

The New York Times reported that 2000 “swindling establishments” were using the postal system "just after the Civil War".

So next time you take a little longer than you'd like to reply to an email or are upset by the amount of spam, reflect on these being problems that did not start with the computer. They began in Queen Victoria's reign, with the advent of the penny post.

As a writer, learn to listen

It was virtually my first lesson as a young journalist... and certainly the first which stayed with me for my whole career. If you are going to write, you have to learn to listen.

It is not just advice needed as a writer. It applies just as keenly if you are doing desktop publishing and have to produce the copy for a leaflet or advertisement. As a specialist in design, you are unlikely to be skilled in the field for which you are producing the design.

So, listen.

With a little prompting, everyone who knows their subject will want to tell others about it, but he or she may be concerned that they do not know how to use words, and the most difficult part of that will be to create the first sentence.

That's you job... to sift through your notes of exactly what they have said and to work out what are the key phrases. Often you will be best served by giving the information in the expert's own words - with just a little light editing.

If you don't understand something then ask, even if you think you may seem a fool for asking the obvious; it is far better to seem a fool to one person that to be proven one when thousands read your result.

I was brought up in what I've seen described recently as a city slum -- it was the area which was razed and rebuilt as the home of the London Olympics. I knew nothing about the country, but one of my early journalism jobs was on a farm machinery magazine. I was supposed to be doing editing and layout but with a tiny staff it meant I also had to go to agricultural shows. When I asked what was new I was likely to be told all about some fantastic new machine; at the very least I had to keep asking questions until the company rep or spokesman would point to something so that I knew which machine to get in the photograph. Much longer and I would have had to admit my ignorance.

Another common error is preparing too many questions in advance of interviewing someone for an article. I saw the effects of this with a TV news host who progressed from one prepared question to the next without listening to the answers until the politician who was being interviewed had cause to stop the interview with the comment "Didn't you hear what I just said?" He had given a direct answer to a question he had been avoiding in earlier interviews but this interviewer was left wallowing, and seemingly unsure what the previous answer had been.

So again, the answer is: Listen.

 

The strange case of uP and dOWN

What is the most annoying key on your keyboard?

For me, and maybe for you, it is the CAPS LOCK key. It seems to get in the way whenever I intend to hit the Shift key. If I'm lucky I may be in Word or some other program which allows me to highlight the mess which results and hit the command to change case, but in others there is no option but to delete and type the phrase or sentence again.

In Word 2010 you go to the Home tab and then in the Font area click on the Aa button to select from a wide choice including lowercase, Sentence case, Capitalize Each Word or tOGGLE cASE.

The CapsLock is a remnant of the old typewriter keyboard that has continued to exist to this day and has survived the many changes in computer keyvoards over recent decades which has seen the number of keys and the positions of some of them go from 83 on the original IBM PC to 104 for the US, Australia and most other countries, though many European layouts have 105 and some in Brazil and Japan have 107 and 109 respectively.

But there is something you can do about that caps lock key, and even about the strangest key, the one labelled SysReg. SysReg is also named as PrtScn, which doesn't actually print the screen but does put a screen dump or image into memory ready to be pasted in an image editor program such as Paint ot even Photoshop.

So, how do you get rid of CapsLock? 

The answer lies in Windows Registry Editor. In Vista and Windows 7 you can search for the local machine code control keyboard layout and replace the scancode which activates when you press the CapsLock key. It then involves entering a sequence of around 20 hex codes.

But there are easier ways. For example, go to:
http://www.randyrants.com/2006/07/sharpkeys_211.html
and download SharpKeys

I went for the MSI version. When installed, press the Add button, select the "Special Caps Lock" with code 00 3A and change it to the default which is "Turn Key Off". You could also change it to another version of the Spceial Left Control key which may be more helpful in reaching many control key combinations.

Think carefully before selecting to write the change to the Registry (you do have a back up of that, don't you?). Then you need to reboot to see it take effect. Though the program says for Windows systems up to Vista, it does work with Win7 too.

You can also download another program, KeyTweak, from http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/
I've read equally good reports of that but have no practical knowledge.

There are other websites you may find helpful, such as How-to-geek at:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-caps-lock-key-in-windows-vista/

That page includes a downloadable set of .reg files to do what I've just done or to a Shift key or to swap the Caps Lock with the Scroll Lock key that may be sitting up there on the right between SysRg and Break. Did you even know you had those? Break dates back to the teleprinter and telegraph. It was a way for operators at each end to know that outlaws or bushrangers had not cut the line. When did you last need to know that?

This article appeared first in the November issue of PC Update, the magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group. It may be reprinted at no cost under Creative Commons conditions with Attribution.

Create your own book on a Kindle

This article was first published in the July 2011 edition of PC Update, the magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group. The article refers to a Kindle-formatted file of this article, which can be Download here: Create your own book on a Kindle

Let us assume you have bought a Kindle, the best selling ebook reader from Amazon. In addition to some free classic novels and a couple of best sellers you may have bought. you would rather like to add the first draft of your own Great Australian Novel, or, more likely, the report you have been preparing for your local service club.

I looked at several methods and my first attempt used a page layout program I am used to, InDesign, which recently included abilities to output to ePub files that can be converted for the Kindle and other ebook readers.

That worked well, but it was complex and I am not about to tell MelbPC members that they should go out and buy programs in the four-figure price range.

Can it be done for nothing? The answer is Yes.

Firstly, what is a Kindle book file? As supplied by Amazon they usually have an .azw extension and appears to be a proprietary format though similar to the published .mobi format. which is the same as the Palm format with the .prc extension. Both of these are recognised by the Kindle.

All these formats are based on XML, eXtensible Markup Language, which brings us to the best known such language which is HTML, Hypertext Markup Language, as used by the vast majority of web sites. In fact, a restricted form of HTML, with a small number of extra tags, is as good a means as any to use for creating an ebook.

There is a very limited range of HTML tags which can be used for formatting a book to read on a Kindle. If you have ever formatted a web page then this will come as no problem to you.

The main ones you have to play with are the set of heading tags: <h1> to <h6> getting progressively smaller (and their associated closing tags </h1> etc; <hr /> for a horizontal rule; <i> and </i> for italics (or you can use the <em> tags for "emphasis"; <b> and /b> for bold (or use the <strong> set); and <blockquote> and close with </blockquote> for a long quotation inset from the left margin.

As well you can use a limited number of CSS (cascading style sheet) commands either in your HTML file or in a separate file that is linked as it would be for a web page and include that in the same folder. If you are used to working with CSS do not try anything far from the most common tags.

Among a very few specific mobi tags is <mbp:pagebreak /> for a page break (suprisingly this seems to be forgotten by many book converters -- a new page for a new chapter does make the whole production look professional). Note that there is a space before the ending slash.

A PDF of the tags which can be used is available from http://kindleformatting.com/ but here is a simple template which might get you going:

<html>
<head>
<title>My first Kindle book</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>My first Kindle book</h2>
<h4>By firstname lastname</h4>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Based on a template published in PC Update, the magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group</p>
<mpb:pagebreak />
<h3>Chapter one</h3>
<p>Here goes all the text you need in as many paragraphs as you need.</p>
<mpb:pagebreak />
<h3>Chapter two</h3>
<p>Here goes all the text you need in as many paragraphs as you need. </p>
</body>
</html>

This is simple enough to edit in Notepad without getting lost in the tags, but you may find it simpler to use a Text Editor, most of which put the tags in a different colour to the text so that you can easily tell the difference. I currently use Gizmo but I have also used NotePads++ from http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ which is also free.

Calibre at http://calibre-ebook.com/ is a program which will manage an ebook collection for one or more ebook readers and will convert between formats as needed within the limits imposed by Digital Rights Management. But Calibre offers many options, often hidden from obvious control, so while it is a program I would recommend, it is easier for the beginner in this field (which was me a matter of a couple of months ago) to use simpler and more specific converters.

For this article I used the free Mobipocket Creator from http://www.mobipocket.com which is a French company that was bought by Amazon in 2005. It is simple to use in that you create a new blank publication and then drag in the HTML file and any required graphics files (plus the CSS file if you are using one), and then click on the Build icon. We will ignore the optional steps to add a cover page and a table of contents. Try these when you have achieved your first success. There is a clear Help file.

Once you have you file, you can then connect your Kindle and drag the completed file, which will have a .prc extension to the documents folder of the Kindle, ready to read.

This article is available as a PRC (Mobi) file at the link shown at the head of this blog post and is available as a Zip file with the complete article as an ebook ready to view on your Kindle and as an HTML file so that you may examine the original code.

No such thing as "writer's block"?

Talked to a local writers' group today: one of the main questions I was asked was about whether I ever got writer's block. My answer: No. ... but that does not mean writing always comes easily.

When I moved on from the first job I got on leaving school, as a stores clerk (or as it was called "trainee purchasing officer" so they could pay less money) and on to a junior position on a magazine one of the more senior people who had been fairly successful in writing articles and short stories wished me well but said he could never do that. He said that he could write when he felt like it but not on demand. "As a journalist you have to write no matter what you feel like".

That's true, and I have never had serious problems. However there are several tricks of the trade.

1. You do not have to start at the beginning. Start anywhere, with any piece of description that you know ought to be included.
2. If it does not flow, be happy to write individual paragraphs. You can even print them out with plenty of space between then slice them up and try arranging them in any order on the desk, then number the sheets and cut-and-paste them in the original word processor document.
3. Write anything as a first paragraph. You know it will be bad but it may well be that the paragraph that it leads into is better, even to the extent that you can often just delete the first paragraph and start with the second. Many articles and even stories have been improved by deleting the first paragraph.
4. Even if the words are needed in a hurry, leave them for as long as you can -- even if just time for a cup of coffee (which you should make for yourself). A short break may still be enough to bring you back with fresh thoughts.
5. If you are not happy with the result, hand it off to someone else. In newspapers there is no shame in telling a copy editor that you are not happy with what you have produced. If you are in a less organized workplace make sure that you know at least one other writer who will look at what you have written and be honest in telling you what is wrong... and do it quickly. You can do the same for that person when he or she needs it.
6. If a word eludes you, write around it. You might find that your prose is better for a simpler vocabulary, or you might find that, having made it unnecessary, the word pops into your mind.

Despite my denying "writer's block", there is a problem which can be just as difficult: procrastination. Often I find it difficult to get a job done without a deadline, and a self-imposed deadline might not work.

The answer can be to promise someone else, such as an editor, that the job will be done by a specified time. You then know that should you fail, there will be much less chance of having items published in future. In writers, as in many other jobs, reliability can be one of the most important abilities.

Errors in newspapers: there should be fewer

Much as I enjoy stories of errors in newspapers (one of the best I've seen was out local newspaper which had "headline in here" in 144pt - 2" - type, an error that I caused to be seen on TV and in the book Type & Layout), they are not happening *just* because of new systems. They have happened even in manual days because of the rush to get the first edition on the streets.

It has always been one of the benefits of living in a country area or one distant from the production point. (The UK newspaper the Guardian became known as "The Grauniad" by Private Eye because of all the spelling errors there was no time to fix.) What should be noted is that most such errors are soon fixed and the vast majority of the readership will have seen nothing odd.

When I was a subeditor on one of Murdoch's newspapers I recall the deputy editor looking at the first edition and shouting at the copy desk: "Well we got it out, now let's turn it into a newspaper". And that was in hot metal days.

The normal setup for newspaper staffing is that galleys, or their equivalent, are read either in printed proof form or on screen, originally by proofreaders, now more likely as part of the copyediting process.

At this stage the copyeditor should take out rude words in the slug because they too often get through to print. The slug is the abbreviated text used to identify a story, originally one word, now more often a kind of suggested headline. As a newspaper editor and chief of staff I banned this kind of dummy head; even if the person writing it would not want it to be the final one it should be something which makes sense and helps clarify what the main point is of the story. If the writer can't write any kind of headline, then it often idicates that the writer is confused.

The headline itself is usually added on the page layout so may be seen only by the person doing the layout of the page. In the past, errors and questionable headlines were often picked up by the compositors, i.e. those who put the page together in metal or phototypesetting, but those people no longer exist. It is therefore most likely the end of the compositor which leads to more errors getting through -- they'd even take a hammer to the plate on the press if necessary since it was sometimes preferable to ensure that no one could read it rather than let an error go through. You can't effectively take a hammer to a digital press, though I'm sure there are many who would have liked to.

The proofreaders who were reading the page proofs might still have been reading the proofs when the press started. On a newspaper with a large or growing circulation, the plate with those changes might then sit by the press until there was a paper break and the press had to be stopped unless there was some danger of legal action. There were trucks, trains, buses and sometimes even aircraft waiting for the newspaper bundles. A little embarrassment for a journalist or editor was not a consideration.

We may actually see fewer errors as newsrooms change over from a print first attitude to one of web first, so the more carefully researched and probably longer print version would have already appeared in two or three versions on the web. Any errors which get through to print will have happened in the final rewrite stage.

The future of news stories is seen in a quote from the consultant brought in by Vance Publishing chief Peggy Waker (even though that's a magazine group): "Instead of researching and writing a lengthy print article, then repurposing it for the Web, the new process would run in reverse: posting a first take of breaking news at 200 words, following with an update at 400 words, then producing a longer second-day story, which would subsequently be repurposed for the print publication." See http://bit.ly/3dDiBU

Ms Walker also tells of expecting an outcry when the web and press editing teams were merged, and not just for single publications but for the whole group. Unexpectedly the large open editorial room was popular -- as it used to be when most publishers were like that.

I'm also pleased to see that computers are now significantly quieter. When I first changed from paper editing the increase in noise level and the size of the monitors meant there was a massive divide between editors. No longer could you read out a questionable phrase to no one in particular, confident that if something was wrong you'd get a shout from a fellow editor nearby. I suspect that as editors get physically closer once more, those co-operative days which caught so many errors will be back.

How long does writing take?

When I was chief of reporting staff for a local weekly newspaper I used to tell reporters they should get a column inch of copy from every minute they spent on the phone. Columns were narrow so it worked out about 25 words to the inch, so a 500 word item should never take more than 20 minutes on the phone and about the same to write it from their notes.

Only one reporter on the newspaper was given the time to do in-depth research which could involve contacting many people in the hope of a snippet of information. But even he would keep several stories on the go at any one time so he always had a backup lead story for the paper which could be ready in half an hour or so if a planned story failed to come through.

Later, as a freelance I got 5 cents an inch from the same paper, so it would only pay if I cc'd the local radio news, and the State dailies plus a rewrite or two for farming newspapers and/or magazines.

The killer is the research time, but, as prolific author Isaac Asimov maintained, the key is to do your research once and then write it many times. Research into a period of history could produce a factual article for adults, a similar piece for children, a short historic story and maybe even a piece of present day or science fiction based on the same events and reactions transposed to a different time.

"I want to be a writer"

The words appeared on a forum to writers and small publishers: "I really want to become a writer."

If you want to be a writer, you write. You may be an unsuccessful writer or a successful one but it is impossible to stop a writer from being a writer.

As one of those people, I started writing as soon as I was capable of stringing words together with stories pinned up on school noticeboards and in school magazines.

I used my first wages to buy a typewriter and wrote a book which was never published. Eventually I found the one thing which could stop me writing -- the publishing business I started to publish my books after my initial publisher went broke. I went on to publish books by others and I had no time left to write. So the publishing company had to go, and I sold it to one of my authors. I wonder now if he is finding the same problem.

Writers have to write. You do not "become" a writer by applying to be one or taking a course.

Nost recently the writing urge has been satisifed by rewriting some of my older articles which, though published, were ones where I retained the copyright and therefore could use a basis for updating. (And that is an important point: because writers have to write they often overlook the aspects of being in business as a writer which will enable them to keep control of their writing; those aspects of being a writer can, and should be, learned).

The rewritten items do not have the same value as the original, so I am making them available at no cost under the Creative Commons licensing system for free use in ezines and blogs, etc, provided they mention me as the source and the name of at least one of my books so I may achieve a small extra income from those. You will find those articles at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Gordon_Woolf

Journalism at its best

As someone commented on an email list for copy editors, the the big difference at a smallish weekly is that just about anyone can march into the editor-publisher's office and take him to task for anything in the paper. They also collar him at the supermarket, on the street, or at a high school hockey game. "There is no statute of limitations. Accountability, up close and personal", stated the writer.

And for those reasons, in my view, it is the best form of journalism there is! My first experience of it (after having been an editor of a couple of magazines, including one with a worldwide circulation) was on a country town paper with an editorial staff of two (the owner/manager and me). It came out at 11am on a Thursday morning and if it was a few minutes late there would be a queue stretching down the street. Even the bus to the next town waited on the opposite side of the street though there was no official stop there -- the driver knew his passengers would be in the queue, as well as having to face the people in that tiny town if he arrived without the supply for the general store.

You very quickly get to know how to spell every family name in town, and you are working every hour that you are awake. Sometimes there are national stories too and you see the difference in the care which has to be taken to get things right. Getting the little facts right is also the key to acceptance as an outsider, especially when you print the things they'd rather were not said.

City newspapers used to send young reporters for spells of a few months on small country newspapers but that is a tradition which seems to have disappeared, though it helped many borderline publications to survive and gave the bigger newspapers much better journalists.

Does punctuation matter?

"Let's eat, Dad" or "Let's eat Dad". A comma can make a big difference.

Is punctuation more important than spelling?

I think it is. After all, most spelling is not so far off that you can't work out what the writer means - and this country and the UK understands what Americans write despite substantial spelling differences.

But an error in punctuation can cause mayhem. And while spelling checkers can at least offer some options, there has been little success with grammar checkers and even less success with the aspect of those which check punctuation.

Of course there will be arguments about where many commas should be put. They were a source of more disagreement with my co-author, Geoffrey Heard, on our book Success in Store than any other subject. I use more commas than he does, but we also tend to use them in different places. However, we did agree on those where they could influence the meaning, and that is important.

Lawyers tend not to use commas and one explained that they need to make it clear that when a comma is included in a contract they have considered its placement and have decided it is necessary.

Despite that, there have been problems with contracts where vast sums have depended on the interpretation of meaning based on a comma.

We can point to some sites where problems caused by this humblest of punctuation marks is discussed:

The University of Hawaii's Hohonu, a journal of academic writing has a nice piece online by Andy Gramlich: Commas, the biggest little quirks in the English language http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/academics/hohonu/writing.php?id=82

Commas have saved a life. lost a million dollars or been blasphemous according to stories at http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/A2E17AAC-4E28-4EA7-B1FC-D5064B155006/

National Punctuation Day was a not massively successful promotion in the USA but sadly it seems to have disappeared. Last year (2008) it was on September 24, but that's not far off as I write and the site is still all about last year, though some are still useful like the piece at http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/meaning.html .

My co-author (and now publisher) is probably right. I use too many commas. You can probably delete most in this article, but a few are needed, including, I hope, the very first one.