g l o s s i n g s

notes in the margins

In the past few months I’ve been helping a college student with papers he’s writing for his composition and technical writing courses and it’s been a very good experience. It’s also been a learning experience in several ways. 

First, I learned that I’m a good editor. I understand writing for sense as well as just content and by having to explain that to the student I have reinforced and reminded myself of how important it is to guide the reader, not just throw information at them randomly.

Second, I learned that I’m a good teacher.  Seeing his writing improve with each draft means I explained it clearly. Even if he still struggles with transitioning his thoughts on paper, he shows improvement and that’s the validation of my teaching. Transitioning thoughts on paper is a lot tougher than you might think because it has to make sense in a way that isn’t necessarily required in your mind or in a verbal conversation.  There are no visual cues to help you shift gears so you have to use the right words, and enough of them, in the right way at the right time to get the reader from where you are to where you want to go next. Not always an easy feat.

Third, I learned that I’d forgotten the basic path of good writing.  Helping him has reminded me of the steps. It’s not always about just typing or putting pen to paper and coming up with good content. In fact, for me, most of the time, the process of writing means I have to do a lot of research and reading to identify the rough path before I can begin the written journey.  It doesn’t even start with a thesis but rather a lot of random but related nuggets of facts/information that have to now be woven together in a way that forms a coherent paper. And even then it’s just a rough draft that will be revised multiple times until there is a smooth read which hopefully will explain, persuade, or educate the reader successfully.

Fourth, I learned that I still love writing.  That’s probably the best and most important lesson I learned from helping my young student and it’s the one I cherish most of all.

So, the next time you opt out of helping someone hone a skill or craft, consider what you might be not learning about yourself and then reconsider giving an assist.  The rewards might not be monetary but they will be invaluable.

-C

This is going to be a rant.  No two ways about it. This is one of my pet peeves with websites containing valuable content.

I am old-school enough that I usually want to read away from my monitor.  I enjoy the feeling of paper in hand, being nestled in the crook of my couch next to a soft light. I read there.  I make notes in the margins.  I absorb the content you worked so hard to provide. But I’m not able to engage your content this way because . . .

I cannot print your page because it’s not styled for print.

What happens when I try to print your page is this: I often lose a portion of your content because it’s fallen off the printer page.  To overcome this I have a few options (all of them extra work that will, depending on my mood and schedule, mean I’ll blow off the effort):

1. I can attempt to PDF the page (providing you don’t have anything funky embedded into your page that prohibits Acrobat from working its magic) where I can then scale it for print;
2. I can copy/paste into Word, where I then will have to clean up the text (which can be a heroic effort if your page is graphics heavy or table rich); or
3. I can try to reduce the print size so that it fits, which can mean almost microscopic type which is ridiculously small and nearly unreadable anyway.

So, what’s the solution? Add a print.css stylesheet to your page and let me print to my heart’s content.  It won’t take long to do this and once you have a stylesheet developed, you can use it again and again.

This is a ultra-simple and basic example of a print stylesheet from A List Apart:

body {
   background: white;
   font-size: 12pt;
   }
#menu {
   display: none;
   }
#wrapper, #content {
   width: auto;
   margin: 0 5%;
   padding: 0;
   border: 0;
   float: none !important;
   color: black;
   background: transparent none;
   }
div#content {
   margin-left: 10%;
   padding-top: 1em;
   border-top: 1px solid #930;
   }
div#mast {
   margin-bottom: -8px;
   }
div#mast img {
   vertical-align: bottom;
   }
a:link, a:visited {
   color: #520;
   background: transparent;
   font-weight: bold;
   text-decoration: underline;
   }
#content a:link:after, #content a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
   font-size: 90%;
   }
#content a[href^="/"]:after {
   content: " (http://www.alistapart.com" attr(href) ") ";
   }

Try it, you might like it; I know I will!