Tweet This site started out as a writing advice blog, and in the earliest days I spent as much time offering Technical Writing advice as I did talking about storytelling. It’s been long enough now that I suspect I’ve mostly lost the crowd that came around for tips on good professional writing, but today I […]
Tweet This week has been a lot of talk about surprises, whether it’s the unexpected catastrophes that derailed both of my meticulously-planned covershoots so far, or the sudden and unfortunate realization a week before a book is supposed to go to press that it has a gaping flaw in one of the most important scenes. […]
Tweet Here we go again, diving back into Microsoft Word and the murky world of section breaks with the next-to-last week in our month-long look at professional document formatting. This week we’ve been talking about page setup, and — like headers and footers and text columns before — page setup is a per-section setting. Changing […]
Tweet I started yesterday with a story about getting the most out of every page of my scribblebook. These day I actually do something pretty similar at work, twisting and reflowing thousand-page instruction books in an effort to shave printing costs while maintaining as much usability as possible. Your tax dollars at work. Paper Size […]
Tweet I’ve waxed romantic around here before about scribblebooks, but that’s always been late in the week when I was talking to my creative writers. Scribblebooks are great for the Art School types, but they don’t have a lot of appeal for serious business writers. And actually…I complain sometimes about my day job, but I’ve […]
Tweet No, you’re not mistaken — that’s a title you’ve seen before. It was the title of the application article on my last Document Style series, and it’ll probably be the title of the third article in next week’s, too. Because that’s what we’re doing. Whether you’re trying to manage text columns, headers and footers, […]
Tweet Yesterday I told a story about Annabelle playing pretend, whether that meant announcing herself to be a ferocious dragon to scare off things that go bump, or an innocent young babe to get away with outright disobedience. Either way, there’s magic in a little bit of delusion. And if you read the article when […]
Tweet As I’m sure all three-year-olds do, our precious little Annabelle has an incredible imagination, and she puts it to great use. As a storyteller, of course, I’ve cherished every moment of that. Or…well, nearly all of them. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but one of my proudest moments as a father […]
Tweet I spent yesterday explaining why technical writers use text columns, providing some specific examples along the way. What I didn’t provide was any kind of instructions. I hope to remedy that today. I’m going to walk you through the basics of setting up columns in Microsoft Word. Setting Up a Columned Layout The easiest […]
Tweet Yesterday’s story about carving out the blackberry bush, while carefully leaving load-bearing columns in the heart of it, would make for an excellent post on document structure. Wouldn’t it? Maybe I’ll have to tell it again sometime when you’re not looking…. Today I want to talk about a different type of columns, though: text […]
