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Upgrading Yourself
by By Walt Varner—SPAUG Newsletter January 2000 Stanford Palo Alto User Group - February 21, 2000 at 12:55:16:
I am besieged these days with requests from my clients to upgrade their software and hardware. Now this is good since a computer user should certainly keep up with the times. However, in this piece, I’m going to suggest some other things that need upgrading—like your touch typing speed, for starters. In fact, I’d guess that most of you were never secretarial speed typists. All of the software stores have inexpensive typing tutor programs.Have you kept up to date on format and punctuation techniques? Have you noticed in newspaper ads and magazine stories some changes have sneaked in? In column format such as newspapers and magazines page layouts, very little material is right justified any more, The left alignment of a column is still straight as an arrow but the right margins meander all over the place. Also, have you noticed how the delimiters in dates and phone numbers have insidiously changed? Christmas day won’t be 12/25/00. It will be 12.25.00.
Telephone numbers have been upgraded also to use periods for delimiters instead of hyphens and parentheses. You aren’t one of the boys if you write a phone number like many people do today as, for example, (408)-739-3488. If you do, you are a relic of the last decade. Today that number is written 408.739.3488 The period (or “dot” as in dot-com) has taken over the role of separator or delimiter. Look at ads in the newspapers and you see what I mean.
Do you have difficulty writing a letter or article for publication? For most people, the basic problem is that no one ever told them the following secret. Don’t try to organize and polish the “piece” as you write it. Just start writing. Don’t worry about what font to use or what type style or margin size, or what the first sentence should say, and so on. Don’t correct misspelled or mistyped words as you go or try to find just the right word.
When you think you’ve covered all the points you wish to make, you then start iterating—smoothing out the flow of thoughts, rearranging sentences, correcting or replacing the misspelled or wrong words, choosing a different type font or size, modifying the margins, and doing the final polish
If you think back to the last article you wrote, you probably iterated it many times before it was finished. You may have interchanged paragraphs for better continuity, replaced words that didn’t have quite the right flavor, and so on. Everyone does this even though they planned or outlined it for continuity and changed sentences as they wrote.
To repeat—the secret is—do not try to write the final document as you compose it. Even if you do, you are still going to have to iterate and polish it several times. You should organize and polish only after you’ve supplied the facts or data you want to display.
For this article, I typed seven paragraphs as fast as I could think and type (about 15 minutes) covering all the points I wished to make. Then I quickly corrected the 24 misspelled words (less than a minute), moved four words and three phrases by selecting and dragging for better continuity (another minute), entered a title and centered it (a few seconds), and adjusted the margins to improve appearance (a few more seconds), and in about 20 minutes the job was done.
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