Without consulting a usage manual or search engine, which would you say is correct?

a. He has a deep-seeded hatred for Tickle-Me Elmo.

b. He has a deep-seated hatred for Tickle-Me Elmo.

Sound off in the comments.

What’s wrong with manual formatting?

OK, those toolbar buttons are so tempting, sitting up there at the top of your screen. It’s so easy to think, “Hey, I should emphasize that word or phrase. I’ll just highlight it and click that nice B button, and maybe the I button, too. And this line is a heading, so I’ll change the font to Arial, bump up the size a bit, and set the whole thing bold.”

Next thing you know, your document is littered with bits and bobs of manually applied formatting. And making sure that you’ve done things consistently becomes a headache. For example, let’s say that your document—a 20-page whitepaper you’ll be presenting to your boss—includes section headings, subheadings, and a bunch of other text formatting applied to different sorts of information. Are you sure you’ve always applied the same combination of formatting to the same elements in your document?

And what if you want to make a change, like changing the font of your body text from Times New Roman to Century, with a bit more space between paragraphs, and an indented first line? Then you have to go through each paragraph, selecting the text, clicking all of the menus and buttons to make the changes.

You should be focusing your attention on the content, on making sure the words say what you want them to say, and here you are, fiddling with the cosmetics, wasting precious time making the document look pretty.

Styles to the rescue

A style is a collection of text and paragraph formatting settings that you can apply with a single click. And if you decide that you want to change it, you only have to change it in one place, and the change will apply everywhere in your document.

Styles are fast, easy to use, and they help you automate things like creating a table of contents. For example, if you’ve used the various Heading styles for the headings and subheadings in your content, creating a table of contents is as easy as a couple of mouse clicks. If you applied the formatting manually, you’ll have to create your table of contents manually, too. And update it manually every time your document changes.

In Microsoft Office Word 2007, you can apply styles using the Styles area of the Home Ribbon, but only a few styles are shown. Press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S to show the Styles window.

If you’re using OpenOffice.org Writer, you can pick styles from the formatting toolbar (shown below), or you can click Format > Styles and Formatting to display the Styles and Formatting window, which gives you more choices.

If you don’t like the looks of the default styles in either Microsoft Office Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, you can change them. You can make the changes in individual documents, or you can experiment with different templates, and have your changes apply to all of your documents.

Learn more

Microsoft has a tutorial on styles in Word on the Office Online site.

My friend Solveig Haugland is an OpenOffice.org goddess, and has a great introduction to styles in Writer on her blog.

Stop messing around with manual formatting. Start using all of the tools at your disposal. Start using styles.

They write a sentence, and instead of plunging on to the next sentence, they go right back to adjust the words, change the phrasing, and correct those little spelling errors. (I have to fight to overcome this tendency myself.) They don’t understand that writing and revising are different processes, and you can’t do both of them well if you try to do them simultaneously.

Ken Davis encountered this kind of thinking recently, working with some managers at a company that made printers. They told him, “Here, we work hard to get it right the first time.”

Ken persuaded them to see things his way by getting them to think of their first draft as a prototype.

I asked the managers to tell me the story of how their company developed and manufactured a new printer model.

They proceeded to describe an elaborate planning process, culminating in the building of a prototype. At this point in their story, I interrupted. "And you make sure to put the company's nameplate on that first printer?" I asked. "And you make sure to have the color of the finish just right? Because you're eventually going to sell it, right?"

The managers laughed. "Of course not," they said. "That printer is a prototype. It's not built to sell; it's built just to test."

"Ah ha!" I gloated. "So you don't do it right the first time. Because you know you won't sell the prototype, it doesn't have to be perfect. Making it perfect--with the right nameplate and paint and all--would be a huge waste of time and would distract you from the more important features that have to be tested."

Your first draft is a prototype. You don’t create it to deliver as is to the recipients; you create it, as Ken says, “to see if it does what it was designed to do.”

When engineers build prototypes, they do so knowing there will be flaws, and that they are likely to fail. But they know that failure here is not a bad thing. In fact, failure is the path to success.

Related to my post on homophones yesterday: Check out the Eggcorn Database for some funny misused words.

The Grammarphobia Blog explains why it’s OK to end a sentence with “with.” For example, “I’m going out for coffee. Want to come with?”

Finally, Adam Freeman recaps “a recent outbreak of common sense throughout the English-speaking world.” In other words, some people think that plain language is good, and legalese is bad! (Shocking, but true!)

Have a good writing link? Share it with us.

Have a great weekend!

"Pizza can definitely be done cheaper at home than from the frozen foods isle or even from the delivery joint."

When I read that bit about the “frozen food isle,” I pictured an idyllic South Pacific scene: The surf gently breaking on the shore, the sun gleaming on white sand, and palm trees gently swaying over the cases full of ice cream and microwave dinners.

And then my reverie broke, and I realized the writer meant aisle, and not isle. And I experienced a moment of homophonophobia: an extreme negative reaction to the wrong word of a homophone pair.

Homophones are words that are pronounced the same way, but mean different things. And  they are frequently spelled differently. Bear and bare, for example.

(Note that a homophone is not the same thing as a malapropism. That’s when you use a word that sounds almost like the word you should have used. I recently ran across a dandy example, where someone was writing about having trouble with the stylist that came with their smartphone. I’m sure they meant stylus. If not, that phone comes with some amazing accessories.)

Whenever I see someone use a homophone for the word they should have used, I am jolted out of following the sense of the text, and I say to myself, “Oh, that’s not at all what they meant to say.”

If someone were to write that “The Bill of Rights guarantees American citizens the right to bare arms,” I would ask them which amendment says we can rip the sleeves off our shirts. (Occasionally, I’ll burst into a giggling fit over the mental image that my witticism evokes. Yes, I am easily amused.)

Homophone abuse is insidious; spell checkers will not tell you that you’ve used the wrong word, and neither will grammar checkers. (There’s nothing grammatically wrong with “the frozen food isle,” or “the right to bare arms.”)

There are several homophone lists on the web; however, very few of them include definitions for the words, which limits their usefulness. I did find one that included links to definitions for each included word. You can find that list here.

Related:

• Watch out for sound-alike words
• When to use “your” and when to use “you’re”

If you don’t know your audience, you might make some fundamental mistakes. Mistakes that will keep your writing from being effective.

Why do we need audience analysis?

Regardless of what we’re writing, we make choices about how we write. For example:

• Should I use this long word, or that short word?
• Should I include this bit of background information?
• Should I add this quotation from so-and-so?
• Should I be dispassionate, or let my emotions show?
• Should I be explicit, or merely hint at these details?

Your own preferences will give you the answers to some of these questions. But other questions can be only if you understand who you are writing to. Let’s revisit those questions above, this time asking them with the audience in mind:

• Will my readers understand this long word, or will it be clearer if I use that short word? If my language is too complex, I risk losing less educated readers.
• Do my readers already know about this bit of that background information? If they are, I can just mention it, but if they aren’t, I’ll need to explain it with more detail.
• Do my readers think that so-and-so, the source of this quotation, is an authority on this topic? If they know who he is, it might help my argument. However, if they think he’s a crackpot, I’ll seem less credible by citing him.
• Will my readers find a dispassionate argument to be more persuasive, or are they moved by an emotional appeal?
• Will I offend my audience if I am explicit with these details? Details can add impact and authority, but some people might say “Too much information!”

The more you know your audience, the better you’ll be able answer these questions. And your writing will be more effective.

How do you analyze an audience?

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just spend a bit of time answering the classic “5 Ws and an H” questions: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How.

Who? – Who are the people who will be reading this? Will most of them be men, or women? How old are they? What kind of education do they have? What are their interests? Do they have a family? What kind of work do they do?

Take this beyond demographics. What are their biases? What keeps them awake at night? What are their aspirations? What are their hot-button topics, the things that make them happy or angry? (Ask Scott Berkun about what not to say at Microsoft.)

You might find it useful to think about a specific person when you write. Pick someone that you know well, and write for that person.

What? – What do my readers already know about this topic? What do they need to know in order to understand what I’m writing about?

Where? – Where will they be when they read this? At home, sitting in a quiet room, sipping a cup of tea? In the subway? On a noisy factory floor? Over a morning cup of coffee, or while they’re making dinner? In a classroom? What kind of distractions will be competing for their attention?

When? – When will they be reading this? When they have plenty of time to absorb it and think about it? Or when they’re under pressure, and every second counts?

Why? – Why are they reading it? What’s their motivation? For fun, or for their job? Because they want to, or because they have to?

How? – How will they read it? In an email message? A book? A magazine or newspaper? On their iPhone or Blackberry? On a sign? At an information kiosk? On their laptop?

The answers to these questions will change how you write. Different audiences have different needs and expectations. You wouldn’t write the same way for a high-school student and a college professor. A magazine audience expects different writing than a newspaper audience does. People reading at work have different needs than people reading for leisure.

Sometimes you can’t be sure about these things; hard facts aren’t available, and you have to start with some assumptions. (For example, if you’re writing a blog, you can assume that your readers are using a computer to read, and that they’re reading because they want to know more about your topic.) But don’t leave your assumptions untested. Try to find out how accurate they are, and revise them as you learn more.

You have to tailor your message to your audience, and that means you have to know your audience.

Another approach: Some people use AUDIENCE as a mnemonic acronym to guide their analysis this way:

• Analysis: Who are they?
• Understanding: What is their understanding of the subject?
• Demographics: What is their age, gender, background, profession, and so forth.
• Interest: Why are they interested in your topic?
• Environment: Where will they be reading, and what are the conditions?
• Needs: What do they need from you?
• Customization: Do you need to adjust things for any special needs or interests of specific audience segments?
• Expectations: What does your audience expect? Do they already have some questions they want you to answer?

You can find out more here: How to conduct audience analysis.

Your turn: Who is your audience? How can you find out more about them? What kind of assumptions have you made about them?

Hugh Macleod riffs on artists and marketing. (Go ahead and substitute “writers” for “artists.”)

If you use email, you must read this, print it out, and post it by your computer: Write revise your email so people will actually read it. (Remember: The secret of good writing is rewriting.)

Patricia O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman note some interesting variations in auxiliary verbs, such as “Did you want…” vs. “Do you want…” What does it all mean?

Enjoy the links, and have a great weekend!

Sometimes I think we restrict our vision when we look for resources to help improve our writing. If we paid any attention in college composition classes, we may have a copy of Stunk and White’s The Elements of Style somewhere on our bookshelf, or perhaps some edition of Joseph M. Williams’ Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

Maybe you’ve gone a bit further, and you have William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, or Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Let’s cast our nets even wider. What can we learn about writing from resources that aren’t really about writing?

For example, from choreographer Twila Tharp, in The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, I learned about her cardboard project boxes, where she puts every bit of material related to a dance project—clippings, notes, videos, sketches, and anything that gives her ideas for the project. Then, when she needs inspiration or to refresh her memory about something, she doesn’t have to hunt all over, because it’s all in the box. So now I pull everything related to a writing project into one place: A physical or virtual file folder, or for larger projects, a box.

Tharp also taught me that it’s vital to get away from the keyboard sometimes. “Movement stimulates our brains in ways we don't appreciate.” And she reminded me of things that I already knew, but maybe drifted away from. For example, I tend to be too literal sometimes, when I could rely on other rhetorical tools like metaphor. “Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, it it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we're experiencing now with what we have experienced before.”

And in Pow! Right Between the Eyes, Andy Nulman taught me that I need to look for ways to jump out of the bushes and surprise people—metaphorically speaking, that is. Surprise is one of the best ways to make something memorable, and what writer doesn’t want their writing to be memorable?

I could list dozens or hundreds of other things that aren’t strictly about writing, but which nevertheless teach me something about writing. You can too, if you give it a bit of thought.

Your turn, and your chance to win Andy’s book

What book, blog, or person (or other resource) has done the most to improve and inspire your writing? (It’s OK if it is about writing.) Reply in the comments, on your own blog, or via Twitter. I’ll choose a random participant to win Pow! Right Between the Eyes, plus my own little surprise prize.

If you leave your comment here, be sure to include your email address. (My promise: Your address will not be published, and I will never ever sell it, give it away, or use it to spam you. Cross my heart and hope to die.)

If you blog about this, let me know about it in the comments or by email, and I’ll link back to your post here.

If you put your response on Twitter, be sure to reply to me, @rjacobse.

The deadline is 12 noon (Central time, GMT -06:00), Friday, 17 April, 2009.

But I have not been spending all of my time playing with sandbags. I’ve had the opportunity to work with myWriterTools, courtesy of Robert Etheredge.

myWriterTools is a collection of tools you can use to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming, and error prone copy-editing and proofreading tasks. It’s an add-in for Microsoft Office Word, so all of these tools are available from the toolbar (or ribbon, if you’re using the latest version of Word).

myWriterTools is much more than a souped-up spelling and grammar checker. Among other things, it performs a readability analysis of your documents, showing you the average number of sentences per paragraph, letters per word, and words per sentence, along with the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (two common readability ratings). From there, you can use the Lighten Up tool, which helps you find and revise the long words and sentences.

Another tool in the myWriterTools toolbox is the Word Flipper, which searches for frequently misused words. When you run this tool, it shows you the definition of each word it finds and offers an alternative, so you can be sure you’re using the right one. For example, Word Flipper will help you be sure that you didn’t use counsel (advice; plan of action) when you meant to use council (an administrative body), or vice-versa.

One thing that caught my eye was a tool that helps you identify words that are spelled and used differently in U.S. and U.K. English. While we can usually puzzle out what things mean—for example, American’s usually understand that when a British writer mentions afters, they’re talking about dessert, and Britons understand that a talk show is a chat show—each time you have to stop and mentally translate something, it hinders your understanding of the whole thing. If you’re an American writing for a mostly U.K. audience, it seems to me that the polite thing to do would be to check that you haven’t used too many Americanisms, at the very least.

There are more tools that I haven’t mentioned—FormatFixer, JargonBuster, lyRemover, ClichéCleaver, GenderBender (the authors seem to have something about mashing words together)—as well as a writer’s reference library and a style guide that you can customize for yourself or your organization.

The interface of myWriterTools does look slightly dated, with a Windows 95 vibe. However, I found that there was much value under the covers. There are two editions, myWriterTools and myWiterTools Plus—Editor’s Edition, and both are available for discounted introductory prices.

I think myWriterTools is a well-rounded and powerful set of tools that can help you polish your work. I give it a 4 out of 5 stars, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it grows in future versions. It’s currently available only for Windows 2000 or later, and works with all versions of Microsoft Office Word from 2000 on.

Check it out at www.mywritertools.com.

But that speed can work against you.

Did you ever:

• Forget to add the attachment before you clicked Send?
• Reply All with a message that was, shall we say, inappropriate for a large audience?
• Receive a hasty response that entirely missed the point of your original message?
• Dash off a hasty response that entirely missed the point of the original message?
• Receive a monosyllable reply to a message and conclude that the sender was snubbing you?

Mandy Lou Stark asks us to remember that, just because e-mail can be transmitted quickly, that doesn’t mean we should write and send it quickly.

E-mail can be tricky and can sometimes even completely negate what a person is trying to accomplish. I can think of so many times when I’ve received an e-mail and took it a completely different way than it was meant, and vice versa. E-mail is supposed to be quick, yes, but I caution about making the thought one puts into e-mail as quick.

For example, she says we should take the time to be courteous.

If I cannot attend an event or have to decline an invitation, I like to be as nice as possible in my decline. However, over blackberry, text, etc. people are trying to use as few key taps as possible and a response might be as short as “can’t.” Even a “sorry, can’t” would be just a tiny bit nicer.

My response would probably be something like, “Thank you so much for the initiation. I would absolutely love to come, but I have other plans that I cannot break. However, let’s make sure we get together as soon as possible in the future, and I hope you have a great time.” And I’m not kidding. Ask anybody who knows me. If you don’t have the time to write a decent response, just wait until you can. Or, consider picking up the phone. You just never know what could insult somebody, and if they have time to formally invite you to something, you should have the courtesy to provide a thoughtful response as well.

With that in mind, Stark offers us her three e-mail rules, which all require that you SLOW DOWN just a bit:

1. Think about what you’re sending, when you’re sending it and to whom.
2. Use common sense. Be sure that the message really is addressed to the person you think it’s addressed to, and “do not send one word that is remotely questionable.”
3. Whatever you do, DO NOT REPLY TO ALL.

Slow down and think before you click Send.

More on e-mail: 10 Tips for Effective E-mail.

Your turn: What was the worst e-mail fiasco you’ve ever been involved in? (Please change the names to protect the innocent, and the guilty.)