A good backup system creates multiple copies of everything to prepare for whatever circumstances may arise while remaining convenient (which means you’ll actually use your system). Here is a good, solid, and fairly easy backup system to make sure you have a reasonably recent copy of all your work whenever you need it.
Though blogs and RSS feeds are the hot thing right now, there are still lots of people who prefer good old-fashioned email newsletter. Newsletters have a number of qualities that make them preferable to blogging for some purposes, such as:
They’re “push” technology: Instead of waiting for a reader to visit your blog, or check their […]
Though writing itself is generally a pretty solitary endeavor, writers can benefit greatly from meeting with and talking to other writers, whether for writing critique, business advice, or just plain emotional support. But how do you find other writers? There’s no “Yellow Pages” entry for “struggling poets” or “beginning screenwriters”, there’s no industry directory, and […]
Last week, I explained how to highlight uses of the passive voice in your writing, using Word 2007. Here’s how to do the same thing in Word 2003 and earlier versions.
To reiterate: the passive voice is when you explain what’s happening in such a way that the action happens to the subject rather than having […]
I tend to prefer old-fashioned pen and paper for going over my drafts and marking revisions and edits. The screen has never struck me as a good medium for reading longer works on, and I think differently with a pen in hand than with a keyboard under my fingers.
That said, Word 2007 puts a lot […]
Chances are, you’ve learned how to insert page breaks into Word documents (Insert > Page Break, just in case). This is useful for, say, adding a “Works Cited” page at the end of a document.
But you might have seen another kind of “break” while moving through Word’s menus. They’re in a different place for some […]
A book can be an unwieldy thing to write, especially on older (read: slower) hardware, and even more especially if you have illustrations, charts, and other graphic material in your file. As the document gets bigger, it gets slower and slower to open the document, to find your place, and to scroll back and forth […]
Styles are an incredibly useful feature in Word — which have unfortunately been rather hidden in previous versions. Word 2007 puts styles right on the main toolbar, so there’s no excuse not to use them.
Using styles allows you to maintain a uniform set of formatting decisions across your document. Instead of formatting individual text selections independently, you […]
No tool is as central to the modern writer’s toolkit as Microsoft’s Word. It is the word processor of choice for most writers — and of necessity for most of the rest. Even when we escape Word itself, we are forced by publisher’s specifications to save our final output in Word’s .doc format.
And, to be honest, it […]
Every author should belong to Amazon’s affiliate program, Amazon Associates. With Amazon Associates, you can create a link which includes your unique tracking ID to a book (or any product) and get a percentage of the purchase from anyone who clicks through to Amazon from your link. You can create links to any product on […]
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