In addition to local, immediately available backups, you also want to keep a backup somewhere off-site, in case of fire, flooding, earthquake, or other traumatic events that could destroy your home. One option is to store a set of backup CDs or DVDs at a friend or family member’s house, in a safe deposit box, […]
The most common danger facing your electronic documents is the loss of a file from your hard drive. Data loss can be caused by several factors: human error (accidentally deleting a file, saving over an existing file), hardware failure (hard drive failure, file corruption, the death of a computer), even malicious intent (a virus or […]
At the climax of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys (and the film adaptation with Michael Douglas) the protagonist sees his novel manuscript, several thousand pages of typescript, blown into the river — lost forever. Though in the novel, the loss of his manuscript frees the author from years of stagnation and paralyzation, any writer can’t help but cringe […]
Although I’m a fan of all-in-one writing programs like yWriter4 and Liquid Story Binder XE, I like the decidedly low-tech Work In Progress Notebook from romance novelist Jeannie Ruesch quite a bit, indeed. Available as either a wire-bound notebook ($14.50 US) or a downloadable Word file you can print and bind yourself ($6.95 US), the […]
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 […]
Enso Words is a free program for Windows XP and Vista that puts the tools writers need the most — spell check, word count, dictionary, and thesaurus — a few keystrokes away no matter what application you happen to be writing in. It’s an ingenious little program that deserves a place on every writer’s hard drive.
Enso Words lives […]
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 […]
One piece of advice that’s floated around a lot to help people stay on track with their big projects is to set a deadline. In my experience, and probably yours, this doesn’t work very well because there are no consequences for not meeting your “pretend” deadline — allowing you the fudge room to keep procrastinating.
Stikk has come […]
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 […]
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