Tag: Writing

WriteMonkey

WriteMonkey is hands-down the best text editor I’ve used on Windows for day-to-day writing, and version 2.0 of the software adds a couple features that make it even better.

Of course, the main feature of WriteMonkey is the minimalist interface that forces you to focus on actually writing (rather than web-browsing or tweaking WordPress settings).

WriteMonkey does offer quite a degree of customization, however. For example, I like to use timers for writing goals — set a timer for, say, 30 minutes and just sit and write until the timer goes off. WriteMonkey has an integrated timer function that the user can choose to display on a status line at the bottom of the screen. Or not. If you would prefer to see a running count of how many words you’ve written, or the current time, or nothing at all, have it your way.

WriteMonkey includes a couple of nice features to handle comments and information that you want to include or reference in a text file but that is not actually part of the text you’re working on (or, alternatively, needs to be differentiated in some way).

First, you can always add // at the beginning of a new paragraph, and WriteMonkey will treat that as a comment and dim it slightly. Using WriteMonkey’s export settings, you can choose to export a version of what you’ve written with all of the comments stripped, or keep them in and choose to style them differently than the rest of the document, or just leave them in as-is. Again, it is up to the user.

Second, and something I use a lot more, is what WriteMonkey calls the Repository. Hit ALT-R while you are writing and you’re taken to the repository — essentially text that is located after an end-of-file tag in the text file you’re working on. Paste whatever you want in the repository and then switch back and forth quickly while you’re editing your text.

For example, I might have an outline or a series of random thoughts related to what I want to write that I can stick in the repository. As I’m writing, I can quickly switch back and forth between the main text and this supplemental material to make certain that I’m hitting on everything I wanted to address in my essay.

There are a lot of other smaller features that are unobtrusive but really help if you want to use them. For example, I like to time stamp everything I write and WriteMonky supports slash-based text substitution, so I can just type “/now” and it will insert the date and time automatically. Those substitutions are completely configurable, so I could easily create one to insert my signature line or other frequently typed text blocks.

Oh, and it is completely free.

Grammar and Spelling on Weblogs

Allan Sullivan offers a few suggestions for improving the grammar and spelling on this weblog.

For the most part, though, I don’t spend too much time worrying about the spelling and grammatical errors I make here. I do go through and edit the things I write here later — though usually 6 months or more later. But almost everything I write here is done as quickly as possible and is simply a first draft.

Now if I were writing for money I’d take the time to do a second draft and look for awkward phrasing, but most of my blogging goes straight from the brain to the text entry box (sometimes without even a spell check). Some of the awkward phrases and grammatical errors Sullivan spots, for example, occur when I start a sentence and decide to change the wording slightly, but forget to alter the pronouns to match the new wording.

Is It Really Real?

One of the more bizarre punctuation errors has to be the use of quotation marks to emphasize a word. Yesterday I was standing in line at a store to return a piece of equipment that I had rented overnight. While I was waiting patiently, I noticed an advertisement this store had for its photo processing which emphasized the option of paying extra for a CD or floppy containing electronic versions of your photographs.

Maybe. Because the advertisement read something along the lines of,

Get “Real” Pictures on CD or Floppy

Which led me to wonder what exactly a “real” picture is. I’m not sure I want to spend the money to find out.

Not quite as bad as what happened to one of my friends who paid extra to have his and his wife’s wedding ring inscribed with some dopey saying like “Love is Forever.” The inscription came back,

Love is “forever”

Oy.

Grammar Expert Plus

Seth Dillingham provided some friendly criticism today about the word choices in my article about bound URLs. Part of the problem is I stayed awake until 4 a.m. watching election returns, and another part of the problem is the ambitious writing schedule I set for myself which does not allow for much time for careful proofreading. A bigger problem, however, is that I used to run articles through a grammar checker but since forswearing word processors for a simple text editor, I have not had access to a decent grammar checker.

Doing a quick Internet search, the only grammar checker for Windows I could find that was not part of a word processing program was WinterTree Software’s Grammar Expert Plus. Simply copy text to the clipboard, launch Grammar Expert Plus, and the program will check for common grammatical problems.

It did a good job of finding comon grammatical errors in articles I threw at it, but unfortunately there is no feature to allow users to create their own grammatical rules, which limits its usefulness. Still, it keeps me from having to install Word, WordPerfect or those other bloated word processing applications.

Levenger.Com

If you are a writer looking for ways to increase your efficiency or just find cool gear to buy, there is simply no place on Earth like Levenger. They stock the sort of items that make you go, “I’d never thought of that — but now that I have, I need at least five of them.”

A lot of their items are expensive, but I’ve always been completely satisfied with the merchandise. It is always of the highest quality.

As a writer, one of the things I find indispensable is their Circa notebook system. I try not to be very far away from a computer of some sort, but there are just times when there is no other option except pen and paper. For those times you just cannot beat the Circa system which combines the best features of a three-ring binder with a spiral notebook. Like I said, the whole package can get pretty expensive pretty quickly, but it’s worth it. Circa, by the way, is just Levenger’s brand name for this ring system and you can find the same thing under different brand names for less, though from what I’ve seen the quality in competing products is also much lower than the Levenger system. I especially love the Levenger paper with the wide right-hand margin for notes.