I can add images, bold text, underline, and italicize. Also, add links like this: Don’t Be Stupid. And that’s it – will be interesting to see  how useful it is. So far seems easy enough to use.

(Update: The image didn’t insert right, although it did upload. It had to be resized significantly, of course, to fit the post. I must have done something wrong, because there’s no reason to have thie upload in the app if you can’t do anything with the image from your phone.)

I decided to go ahead with that project, and am well into getting the site up and running. The site is called The Writer’s Technology Companion and will be launching sometime in March at www.writerstechnology.com. There’s a launch page there now, where you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe to the RSS feed so you’ll be informed when the site officially goes live.

The Writer’s Technology Companion is going to cover the tools of the writing trade, including computer hardware and software, blogging tools, ways to promote and sell material on the Web, self-publishing tools, and more. The focus is on writing in general — everyone from romance novelists to screenwriters to freelance technical writers should find something useful.

I look forward to seeing you there!

You’d be wrong. It’s actually under the “Options” tab. According to Microsoft engineers*, this is strictly to keep you on your toes and prevent you from becoming complacent.

*Note: The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent the opinions of actual Microsoft engineers, none of whom were consulted in any way other than presumably in the writing of this post.

A good outline is a map to your goals – and like any good map, as you follow along you’ll see new and often more interesting ways to get where you’re going. But you wouldn’t set off on a long journey without any map at all, would you? (The popularity of online services like Google Maps, Mapquest, and Yahoo Maps suggests not.) An outline serves primarily as a reminder, helping you to keep the end goal in sight and to evaluate your progress along the way. It’s also a pretty good charm against writer’s block – many prolific writers say that when they don’t know what to write next, they just check their outline and crank out pages, however crappy. Knowing what to do next helps bring them around to their next point, even if they have to detour a little to get there. There’s always editing (remember?).

Of course, in high school, you were probably given a complicated set of Roman numerals, capital and lower-case letters, and numbers and sub-sets and superscripts and… Forget all that. An outline doesn’t have to be any more complex than a list of points you want to cover and the order you want to cover them in. The more detail you capture at the beginning of your project, though, the easier it will be to develop your work later on. Once you have a list of topics, it’s a good idea to go back and fill in some sub-topics, even sub-sub-topics. I use a program called Keynote for this, even though the author stopped updating it two years ago. Keynote is an outliner program, with a nice text editor built in, so I can write the body of my article directly into my outline. It’s a process of gradual accumulation: I list the topics I want to write on, then add sub-topics and sub-sub-topics, then crank through them one by one, writing a paragraph or two for each sub-topic. Then I export the whole thing to Word (from the “File” menu), clean it up, and add a line here or there where the transition from one point to the next seems rocky.

But you don’t need specialized software to make a decent outline. A piece of paper with some scribbled notes is good, too. The point is to have something, some idea of what you want to write and how you want to write it, before you start writing in earnest. You’ll find that once the outline is done, most of the thought process is finished – the rest of the paper just flows into place. And because you’ve already worried about what facts are needed to support each part of your argument, you don’t have to worry about it when you’re writing – which means you can focus on crafting wonderful, creative sentences.

And it’s working!

Here’s how it works: you finish a paper in the bleary-eyed dead of night, mere hours before it’s due. You hit the spell-check button, and run through your errors, generally hitting “change”, “change”, “change” and on and on without really looking at the errors spell-check claims to have found or the changes it recommends. When you’re done, maybe you take a quick glance at the page – no red squiggles? Good, you’re golden.

Except, you’re not. Spell-check will catch the most obvious errors, but it’s fairly blind to matters of context and subtlety. All it does is check each word against a list of known words – if a word in your text isn’t on its list, it suggests the closest match. For most college-level writing, you will be using words that will not be on its list – these words have to be added to the dictionary manually, which requires a little more attention than the average last-minute proofreader can muster. More than that, though, spell-check doesn’t see a problem with a word that’s misspelled, as long as it still spells something. (Word 2007 is supposed to have some ability to catch these words, but the program is still so new that the scope of its abilities aren’t clear. Plus, most people will be using pre-Office 2007 software – either Office 2003 or XP, or WordPerfect, Works, or OpenOffice, which do not handle contextual misspellings.)

This is where you start to look stupid. If you write “Their are three things you should have in you’re bag at all times”, spell-check thinks that’s fine. Your human audience, however – your professor, maybe fellow students, maybe a college admissions committee, or whomever – won’t think you’re fine, they’ll think you’re a bit slow, lacking a basic command of the English language. This is especially embarrassing if English is your native language!

The conspirators are counting on this – they want you to look silly, and nothing looks sillier than not knowing the difference between “are” and “our”. But, of course, you claim that you actually do know the difference – and you probably do, but what good does that do you? Prospective employers won’t ask, nor will grad school admission boards, nor anyone else.

Meanwhile, the folks at Microsoft and their Korean co-conspirators are laughing and laughing, even as they shift their investment portfolios out of American companies and into Indian and Turkish corporations – knowing that the Turks and Indians will be more than prepared to step in with clearly-written language when America crumbles under the weight of its own mockability.

There are, of course, things we can do to prevent this future from unfolding and to stop this global conspiracy in its tracks. First of all, know your tools; understand how spell-check works and how to make changes to its functionality. For instance, if there’s words you mistype a lot, did you know you can add them to Word’s auto-correct list? (Other programs that auto-correct likely have the same ability.) Some years ago, I worked in a museum. Because of my let’s call it “unorthodox” typing style, I tend to mistype the word “museum” as “msueum”. Kind of a problem, right? No big deal, though – I just opened Word’s options and added my goofy spelling to the list, requesting that every time I type that abomination, Word simply replace it with “museum”. From then on, all was well in the world: I received medals and plaques for excellence in spelling the name of the organization consistently, the museum received grants and gifts because of the fine treatment of its name on grant applications and other communications, overnight art became literally the single most important thing to the world’s citizens. That’s why there’s no more reality shows.

OK, back to reality now: another thing you can do to prevent the imminent outsourcing of your future jobs to Nigeria, where well-formed English flows like sweetened tea from the tongues of the locals, is to… OK, you’re not going to like this. So sit down, grab your comfort blanket, and take a deep breath. The other thing is to finish your work at least a day early and then proofread it before it’s due. Better yet, have someone you trust – that is, someone who can tell you how dumb you are without it hurting your feelings; this is an excellent test of the strength and quality of your relationships, by the way – read your work and tell you what mistakes you’ve made. Note: this only works if your reader can spell.

If it were only your future at risk, I wouldn’t bother here. Surely some smart student in your classes will realize what you’re doing to yourself and position herself or himself accordingly to make sure that your goals and dreams land squarely on her or his shoulders. That’s no big deal (for her or him, anyway – it might upset you a bit, but that’s competition for you. What’re you gonna do?). Unfortunately, with the future of the free world hanging on your willingness to create well-crafted prose, I feel obligated to intervene here. If you want Bill Gates, Kim Jong-Il, and the 14-year old Chinese kids who will write the future’s business requirement documents, requests for proposal, and grants for a tenth of what you’d charge to win, by all means, keep using spell-check as your only line of defense against typos. But if you care at all about the world you’re in, please, I beg you – your country begs you! – be just a little more careful with the typos.

Special super-bonus reading: 10 flagrant grammar mistakes that make you look stupid

There are several reasons why so little attention is paid in college to the technology that gets you through day to day. One is that many academics themselves don’t really know much about computers. All but your youngest professors came of age when typewriters were still in common use, and have only barely mastered the fundamentals of computing, often in bits and drabs accumulated working on their own. Another reason is that there are so many programs, operating websites, and services that do the same thing that there are often no generic ways to do anything, and teachers fear that explaining how to do something in one program might hopelessly confuse students who use a different program. A third is that some professors are intimidated by the knowledge their students already have – many of you are so-called ‘digital natives”, with thumbs the size of oak branches that move at the speed of light over your cell phone keypads. It is often though, erroneously, that students have nothing to learn about technology from us old fogeys.

And yet… I’ve had to teach students how to attach documents to emails, how to format their margins, how to save in file formats other than their program’s defaults. While most software promises to make whatever it is a program is supposed to do easy and painless, all software comes with a learning curve. Most often, we quickly master the rudiments of a program’s functions and then ignore the other 80% of what the program does. Here’s an interesting fact: while planning the latest release of Office, Microsoft surveyed thousands of computer users about the functions they’d like to see in their office suite. Almost without exception, people wished for features that were already available — they just hadn’t figured out how to access them.

Take some time to get to know the software you use the most – especially your word processor, spreadsheet, email, and Internet browser. Go through all the pull-down menus and google anything that isn’t self-explanatory. “Mail merge”, for instance. “Pivot table”. Check the various file types available under the “Save As” menu (usually there’s a drop-down menu with all the formats you can save a document as). If possible, change the default file-type to a standard format like “MS Word .doc” for word processors – your professor will thank you when you email her a paper and opening it doesn’t produce pages of gibberish! Read a couple of reviews and a tutorial or two about your software – learn its strengths and weaknesses and some of its obscure functions. Check the import and export options, if there are any, and see what programs you can swap data with.

Unless computers hopelessly confuse you, you don’t need to take a class to learn how to use most software. But you should spend a few minutes here and there studying your programs – mastering the functions you use already and learning new ones. You may well discover new ways to do tasks that are otherwise painstakingly difficult, or ways to integrate programs that increase your productivity. In any case, you’ll become more and more comfortable with your tools, until using them becomes second-nature and you can spend your time figuring out the solutions to the world’s problems instead of the solutions to your formatting problems.