The Writer’s Technology Companion

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 RSS reader, you “push” newsletters directly into readers’ email inboxes. Since most people check their email daily (at least!) there’s a good chance they’ll read your newsletter the day you send it (or shortly thereafter).
• You build a list: You have a record of the email addresses — and often the name and other information, such as location — of your newsletter readers. This is valuable information for anyone with some marketing savvy; most importantly, it means you can always reach the readers most important to you.
• You have pretty exact numbers: It can be hard to analyze website logs to determine how many people are visiting your site and what they’re doing there. Are unique visitors more important, or daily hits, or time spent on site? How do you put it all together? With email newsletters, you have numbers that are more like a magazines subscription count: while you can’t be positive the people who get the newsletter are reading it, you know exactly how many are getting it.

Use Feedburner to Create Your Newsletter

The easiest way to set up a newsletter is to use Feedburner’s email service. Feedburner is an RSS feed service, but they can take the content of your RSS feed (which is generated automatically by most blogging sites’ software) and send it via email. They handle the signups and confirmations, providing a sign-up form you can embed on your site, and will auto-generate a newsletter whenever there’s new content in your feed.

You can use Feedburner to simply recreate your blog in email form — every time you post, your list will get a copy of the post via email. Since only a small percentage of websurfers really “get” RSS, this provides a way to turn first-time visitors into regular readers. You can customize the header of your newsletter with a logo, and include ads in your newsletters if you want.

With very little work, you could also create a specialized newsletter “channel”, offering premium or bonus content in addition to your blog — or instead of blogging at all. In Wordpress, you can easily set up a category of posts that don’t get published to the front page, and generate category-specific feeds (they’re at “http://yoursitename.com/category/categoryname/feed” for each category). Create a “newsletter” category, and feed its URL to Feedburner. If you’d like to send newsletters out on a specific day, simply schedule all your posts to be published on that day using the Wordpress “Schedule” function. On the allotted day, Feedburner will collect all the posts from your RSS feed, apply your custom formatting and header, and generate a table of contents that will appear at the top of your newsletter.

When I launched this site in late March, I had a few ideas about who I thought would be interested in the kind of material I post here. But to be honest, the site’s readership ahs grown a lot faster than I’d expected — we touched 600 RSS/Email subscribers yesterday, and a couple hundred people also visit the front page every day. So I’m estimating my readership at around 1000 or even more people — which makes me think that I was mistaken about who would be reading.

So, for a little weekend fun, I thought I’d ask: who are you? Are you a beginning writer or a more established one? Do you blog, and if so, where? What kind of writing do you do? What is your “day job”, if it isn’t writing? What are you interested in?

Let’s get to know each other a little better, ok?

Angela Booth, a writing coach and author of numerous books, ebooks, and blogs for writers, selected The Writer’s Technology Companion as the first Writing Blog of the Day today. Here’s what she was kind enough to write about the WTC:

Dustin covers all those techy things which you should know as a writer, but were too scared to explore, like MS Word styles and Master Documents.

Check out Angela’s site — there’s a ton of great advice for writers, including lots of good information to help you make money writing.

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 in your system tray (the little icons next to the clock in the lower right corner of your screen) and most of the time stays out of your way. To bring it up, you hold down the Caps Lock key while typing a command, like “word count”. That’s the theory, anyway; in reality, Endo Words usually knows what you’re asking by the first or second letter; on my system, just typing “W” with the Caps Lock key pressed is enough. When you release the Caps Lock key, the command is activated, and a window pops up with the results.

Enso Words works on whatever text you’ve selected, so you can spell check part of a document, or get a word count just for the paragraph you’re working on. You can get dictionary definitions from Answers.com (Caps-d), thesaurus entries from the same site (Caps-th), a word count (Caps-w), or spell check (Caps-s). If you don’t like using the Caps Lock key for this, you can change this to the Alt, Ctrl, or Windows key in the preferences (I use the Windows Key).

Enso offers a more complex program (also free) called Enso Launcher that can launch programs and open files using the same Caps Lock-keystroke combinations; the two programs play verynicely together. I tend to prefer opening my applications the old fashioned way, with mouse clicks, but you might like using Enso Launcher. For writers who do a lot of writing on different websites or in different interfaces besides their word processor, Enso Words is a really nice tool to have available.

Enso Words (Free)

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 nobody has yet created a geographic map of writers using data from their websites.

Meetup is a pretty good place to start looking. Meetup is a web-based tool to help organize off-web meetings. There are meetups for knitters, photographers, Barack Obama supporters, feminists, fishers, doll collectors, you name it! Of course, writers are pretty well represented, as well.

To find a writing-focused group near you, go to their main page and enter a keyword to search for and your zip code. Meetup will search its database for any group within 20 miles that includes your search term in its name or description. For example, there are 10 groups near me that have something to do with “writing”, ranging from the Las Vegas Writers’ Group to specialist groups like the Nevada Film Industry Meetup Group and the Blogworld and New Media Expo group (which meets annually when the Blogworld blogging convention is in town).

Each group has a profile page that lists where they meet — usually a restaurant, coffee shop, bar, or formal meeting space — and when (e.g. “Second Tuesday of each month”). Once you’re logged in and join a group, you can see information about the members, notes on previous meetings, photos, and other information.

If you don’t find anything near you, you can either a) add your name to a “waiting list” to be notified if anyone starts a meetup on a specific topic, or b) create your own meetup. Meetup supports itself through a fee charged to meetup organizers: $19 US a month ($15 a month in blocks of 3 months; $12 a month in blocks of six). Many meetup organizers ask their attendees to pitch in a couple of bucks a month to defray this cost.

To start a group, search for a topic, and select one of Meetup’s group categories that relates to your topic. Give your group a name and description, accept the terms, and schedule your meetings. Meetup will contact members in your area who have expressed interest in a meetup with your focus, and your group will show up in the regular listings.

Meetup is a pretty cool way to network with people you’d otherwise never meet. Though there is a small charge to create your own meeting, if you ask a dollar or two of each member, just as you’d split a restaurant check (or just pass the hat), the costs shouldn’t be much of a barrier.

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 the subject do the action. Consider this sentence:

• The Fonz was standing against the wall.

It’s a weak sentence, becuase standing is sort of happening to the Fonz, who we all know is not the type of guy to take such an unengaged approach to life. Consider this, instead:

• The Fonz stood against the wall.

That’s the Fonz we know and love, taking charge of his standing!

The verb “to be” and its various forms are the hallmarks of the passive voice. They make your action into something that a character or feature is rather than something they do. Politicians love the passive voice, because it distances them from the effects of their bad decisions: “Mistakes were made” versus “I made a mistake.” “Unemployment is up” rather than “I caused unemployment to go up.”

[Read the rest of this entry…]

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 up with a way to make sure there are consequences if you fail. Stikk is an online service that allows you to set up a “contract” with yourself, and back it up with money. You deposit $10, $20, $100, or whatever amount is worth working for, and if you achieve your goal, you get it back. If not, the money is donated to one of several charities Stikk has established partnerships with.

If putting your own money on the line isn’t enough to keep you motivated, Stikk has another card up their sleeve: the anti-charity. Select this option, and not only will you lose your money if you fail to reach your goal, but Stikk will donate it to a charity you hate. If you’re pro-life, it will go to a pro-choice charity; pro-choice writers can choose a pro-life one.

Stikk allows you to self-report whether you’ve failed or succeeded, working on the honor system. If you don’t quite trust yourself to be honest, you can designate a third-party “referee” to verify your success or failure. Pick someone you trust to be fair — if they say you’ve failed, you’ve failed, as far as Stikk is concerned.

You can set Stikk up to track a single big goal, but you can also set incremental goals — like, “write 5,000 words a week). I wouldn’t set goals that are more granular than that, since you do need to log in and report success or failure for each goal — or your referee does, if you choose to have one. Try to find a “sweet spot” that’s frequent enough to keep you working steadily but not so frequent that keeping your Stikk account up-to-date eats into your writing time.

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 of useful tools at your fingertips for proofreading and editing. Of course, there’s spell-check, which is a useful tool when used wisely and carefully (I can’t tell you how many papers I’ve read by students who apparently ran spell-check and simply accepted whatever changes Word recommended). But there are a lot more little tools that can prove very useful indeed — you just need to know where to look.

Here then, in no particular order, is a grab-bag of tips and tricks for editing and proofreading using Word 2007. Some of these tips might work for earlier versions of Word, but since I don’t have an earlier version available, I can’t test them to make sure.

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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 reason — go to the Page Layout tab and look at the “Page Setup” section and you’ll see a drop-down marked “Breaks”. Here you’ll find several different ways to insert section breaks:

• Next page: Inserts a section break and moves you to the next page. Useful for starting a new chapter.
• Continuous: Inserts a section break but keeps you on the same page. Useful when writing copy that you don’t know the end-formatting for, such as something that will eventually end up as a sidebar.
• Even Page: Inserts a section break and jumps you to the next even page. Useful for booklets.
• Odd Page: Inserts a section break and jumps you to the next odd page. Useful for book layouts, where you always want the chapters to start on the odd (right-hand) page.

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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 to see what you’ve done.

Fortunately, Word has long had a little-used feature that allows you to work with separate “chunks” of content and compile them into a single final document. It’s called a “master document” and is a pretty straight-forward but powerful tool. Simply put, a master document is a single document that pulls content in from several other documents, like individual chapters.

In the past, people have had some trouble with master documents, and it’s easy to see why: you’re asking Word to put together documents with different preferences, formatting options, and other settings, and Word has to make some difficult choices. If you’re using consistent style sets across your documents, though, much of Word’s work is done for it. And since Word 2007 makes styles so much easier to work with, many of the problems users of previous editions of Word had should be alleviated.

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