(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
A few months ago I encountered a bank of hotel elevators that made a big impression on me. This might be old hat to you,* but to me it was a wondrous invention: there were no buttons inside the elevators for choosing your floor. Instead,
Have you ever been put out of a cab after you ever waited forever and finally lassoed one and got in and after sailing past a street where you would have turned (if you had been driving), said, “Shouldn’t you have turned there?” and the driver slammed to the curb and said, “You can get another cab,” leaving you incredulously asking, “What—? Are you kidding? Are you putting me out?” and, seeing his face, had to grab your things and slam the door (cab drivers hate that) and hike back four blocks to the thoroughfare and wait for another cab? Me, too.
Soon after I wrote about recording a macro to type an en dash, my friend and colleague Russell Harper wrote to me, as he often does after I venture into giving technical advice, to point out how I might have done it better.
MS Word has a feature that lets nontechie types record macros without knowing a Ø from a 1. Here’s how to make an en dash every time you type Control-hyphen: . . .
This will be old news to many readers, but I only recently discovered the Snipping Tool in Windows 7, and it is so useful and easy to use, I feel compelled to share. With this little gadget you can take a stable snapshot of anything on your computer screen and paste it into a Word doc, an e-mail, a blog post, or pretty much anything you would normally paste into.
Finally, instead of just whining about overstuffing on e-mail, I can promote some easy and practical ways to start slimming it down.
Any writer or editor who works with Microsoft Word’s “tracked changes” feature has encountered the difficult of reading through a tangle of editing like this.
Do you have any deficiencies that you find dispiriting? Me too.
Last week, I asked how you would locate quotations within quotations in a Word document in order to style the inner quotes with single quotation marks. Your answers ranged from nonstarting to overthought to brilliant! Some of the answers worked…
Looking over the work of a proofreader the other day, I saw that she had marked a place where the quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation were incorrect. Single quotation marks were needed for the inner quote, but double quotation marks appeared. This was my fault;