Dustin M. Wax » tips http://dwax.org writer, educator, anthropologist, and freelance thinker Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:04:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 A Zune Tip http://dwax.org/2008/01/08/a_zune_tip/ http://dwax.org/2008/01/08/a_zune_tip/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 So after three years of telling everyone in my family that all I really wanted for Christmas was an MP3 player, this year someone finally stepped up to the plate and delivered. My partner, bless her, bought me a Zune.

"A Zune?!" I hear you sputtering.

And after a moment's thought, I her you thinking, "OK, well, those new Zunes are pretty cool, what with the squircle and all."

Except I didn't get a new Zune.  I got one of the old, 30GB models.

"Well, OK," you're thinking.  "The white and black ones are kinda OK-looking."

Except I didn't get a white or black one.  I got a butt-ass ugly, Soviet-era design, monkey-crap brown (with baby-crap green highlights!) Zune. [Continue reading]]]> So after three years of telling everyone in my family that all I really wanted for Christmas was an MP3 player, this year someone finally stepped up to the plate and delivered. My partner, bless her, bought me a Zune.

“A Zune?!” I hear you sputtering.

And after a moment’s thought, I her you thinking, “OK, well, those new Zunes are pretty cool, what with the squircle and all.”

Except I didn’t get a new Zune.  I got one of the old, 30GB models.

“Well, OK,” you’re thinking.  “The white and black ones are kinda OK-looking.”

Except I didn’t get a white or black one.  I got a butt-ass ugly, Soviet-era design, monkey-crap brown (with baby-crap green highlights!) Zune.

I love it.  Does this woman know me, or what?

The nice thing about the Zune is that Microsoft, out of some strange and I have no doubt foreign to them urge, decided to make the firmware of the new Zunes backwards-compatible with the first version — which means that, after a short update, my brown 1st-generation Zune has all the capabilities of the latest Zunes.

Among those new features is integrated podcast support. You can subscribe in the Zune software, either to Microsoft’s selection or by inputting your own feeds.

What a lot of people find frustrating — including me — is that if you go to the Podcast section of your Zune, select an episode, and listen to it, when it reaches the end of the episode, it stops. You’d like it to go on to the next episode, right? So you could avoid, say, manually selecting the next episode while you’re driving to work? But it doesn’t do that.

I looked at a lot of websites looking for a way to make it play the next episode automatically, and all I found was lots of other people frustrated, even angry, about the same thing.

But I figured it out, and in the interest of giving all those Zune owners a helping hand, I’d like to share the answer I’ve come up with.

Instead of selecting an episode and hitting play, select the title of the series you want to listen to and hit play. When you do this, the Zune will move directly from the end of one podcast episode to the beginning of the next, just like you want.

There are a couple of hiccups that I don’t know how to deal with, unfortunately:

  1. Unless the last thing you listened to was an episode of the podcast you want to listen to now, the Zune doesn’t remember where you were and starts the series from the first episode you have on your Zune. You have to manually skip through each episode, one at a time, until you reach the episode you want to listen to next.
  2. There’s no other way to sort podcasts. You can’t, say, listen to podcasts from different series in the order they were released, or all podcasts older than a week, or the most recent ones, or anything like that.  You can only listen to the podcasts in a single series, and in the order in which they were released.

It’s not perfect, but at least it will help keep you from rear-ending the truck in front of you on the freeway as you try to select the next episode of your favorite podcast!

]]> http://dwax.org/2008/01/08/a_zune_tip/feed/ 0 This Week on lifehack.org http://dwax.org/2007/08/06/this_week_on_lifehack_org/ http://dwax.org/2007/08/06/this_week_on_lifehack_org/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 lifehack.org! This week's posts were:
Design Better with CRAP, an introduction to basic design principles for writers, business people, and anyone else who needs to present information in the most effective way possible. A Basic Guide to Thrift Store Shopping, a guide to making the most out of [Continue reading]]]> Another interesting week at lifehack.org! This week’s posts were:
Design Better with CRAP, an introduction to basic design principles for writers, business people, and anyone else who needs to present information in the most effective way possible.
A Basic Guide to Thrift Store Shopping, a guide to making the most out of thrifting.
Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Research, tips for students who need to develop solid research skills.

Two of the articles, the design article and the research article, were big hits on digg this week, which baffles me. The design article was somewhat controversial (I suppose that’s the word for it) as I had drawn the core ideas there from a book by Robin Williams (not the comedian!) called The Non-Designer’s Design Book. In my rush to get the piece up, I hadn’t even stopped to think that the ideas I relayed were associated with a particular author, so I didn’t mention her — leading to some scattered charges of plagiarism and a visit from Williams herself, who was incredibly gracious. The nice part is that I struck up a nice email conversation with Williams, who suggested a couple of things to talk about in future posts.

The other “dugg” article is more baffling — at the moment, there’s some 900+ diggs on the research article. Since I’m pretty sure there isn’t a huge contingent of reference fanboys and fangirls out there, the best guess I can come up with to explain its digg-ness is that I mention Wikipedia in a positive light (though I recommend students not cite it in their written work). There seems to be some deep craving among students to have their favorite research source validated in some way. Other than that guess, I have no idea what caused so many readers to digg on the research piece.

Which suggests that, although as I’ve written earlier I think I might have a talent for writing stuff that people digg, I really don’t know what that talent consists of. I would not have guessed any of my pieces this week would attract excessive attention from the digg community.

I should add, it’s not that I’m obsessed with digg or anything like that — even though I’m a member from way back, I’ve never actually dugg anything, and I rarely visit the site (I do listen to DiggNation, though). Digg stats are one metric among several available to us as writers, and an intriguing one because digg does drive a lot of (a certain kind of) traffic. Digg offers a way of identifying trends among a subset of our audience, a slightly finer-toothed tool than the other stats available to us (Technorati rankings, Alexa ratings, Google PageRank, etc.). It also offers an interesting, of baffling, insight into my own writing — how well (or, in this case, poorly) I envision my own audience and realize that vision in my work. Not that I’m complaining — there’s worse things than inadvertently appealing to the digg audience!

This week, I’m starting a lengthy series, digging deep into a book I’ve just finished, and we’ll see how much attention the digg audience musters for that. I’m looking forward to it — it’s the first time I’ve tried anything like this, but it’s a fabulous book and I think I have a lot more to learn from it than just reading it can unlock. To find out which book, you’re going to have to wait an either a) read it on lifehack.org, or b) see next week’s lifehack.org post.

‘Cause I’m evil that way.

]]> http://dwax.org/2007/08/06/this_week_on_lifehack_org/feed/ 0 This Week on lifehack.org http://dwax.org/2007/07/29/this_week_on_lifehack_org/ http://dwax.org/2007/07/29/this_week_on_lifehack_org/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 lifehack.org:
Becoming a Great Step-Dad Don't Be Eeyore Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better [Continue reading]]]> Here’s what’s new from me at lifehack.org:

Becoming a Great Step-Dad
Don’t Be Eeyore
Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Writing

Nothing spectacular like last weeks 1600+ diggs piece, but some nice work anyway. The first piece, on becoming a great step-dad, my partner asked me to write, so that one’s dedicated to her; a few people left some really nice comments on it, so I guess it touched at least a handful of readers. The last one is part of an irregular series I’ll be posting on writing and researching — next week, I’ll follow up with a post on research skills.

And that’s all.

]]> http://dwax.org/2007/07/29/this_week_on_lifehack_org/feed/ 0 Best Practices for Students #5: Know the System http://dwax.org/2007/06/18/best_practices_for_students_5_know_the_system/ http://dwax.org/2007/06/18/best_practices_for_students_5_know_the_system/#comments Mon, 18 Jun 2007 22:31:19 +0000 dustin [Continue reading]]]> Universities are complex. Needlessly complex. The modern university represents an accretion of over a thousand years of tradition – why else do you think you are expected to dress like a medieval scribe for graduation?

A lot of students try to navigate blindly, responding to the sometimes almost random demands of the system, hoping at any given moment to find someone – anyone! – who can tell them what the heck they’re supposed to do next. Although a lot of schools offer study skills courses to their incoming students, few offer a college survival course to help students figure out how everything fits together.

And it’s far from self-evident – even the vocabulary of the university is weird: there’s registrars and proctors and bursars and provosts and… Who are all these people, and what do they want from you? And more to the point, what are they there to do for you?

Because that is, after all, their job: to facilitate the process of getting you educated. It’s crucial that you learn how the system works at your school, not only because it will help you make smart decisions about your education but because it will help you plan for your life after college as well.

For instance, do you know the difference between an adjunct professor, an associate professor, a visiting professor, an assistant professor, and a full professor? In the classroom, the difference is negligible: they are all people with a strong background in the disciplines they are teaching, and while a full professor might have more experience than an adjunct (or not – some people adjunct their whole lives while pursuing other, non-teaching work) they’re basically all able to provide expert instruction in the topics they teach. But full, assistant, and associate professors are full-time employees of the school, while visiting and adjunct professors are temporary – visiting professors are usually on a fixed term, while adjuncts are hired each semester or year on a short-term contract. There’s a good chance that an adjunct or visiting professor won’t be there a year or two after you graduate – which might matter quite a bit if you decide to go on to graduate school and need recommendations. Full professors, on the other hand, tend to be the senior scholars at the school – tenured, with several publications, and well-connected in the field; a recommendation for a graduate school, scholarship, or job from a full professor will probably carry a lot more weight than one from an adjunct.

It’s important that you make sure you have strong connections with the senior faculty in your department – which doesn’t mean you should avoid the junior and temporary faculty, but it does mean that you should be careful about making strong ties only with junior scholars. A little research on the department website or in your class catalog will reveal the rank of your professors – it doesn’t hurt to check into them a little.

Likewise, ask someone – perhaps your advisor – to help you figure out what all the bizarre job titles you’re confronted with mean in the real world, or look them up on the Internet. Take an evening and actually read some of your college handbook to see what the different divisions of the school are and who the important players are. Call offices and see what they do. The point is to find out what the university has to offer you and how to take advantage of it, rather than settling for whatever services you happen to come across.

]]> http://dwax.org/2007/06/18/best_practices_for_students_5_know_the_system/feed/ 0 Best Practices for Students #4: Outline http://dwax.org/2007/06/13/best_practices_for_students_4_outline/ http://dwax.org/2007/06/13/best_practices_for_students_4_outline/#comments Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:54:11 +0000 dustin [Continue reading]]]> My, my, we do hate the idea of outlining, don’t we? Most people think of an outline as a rigid straightjacket hampering the flow of true creativity. But guess what – the writers you admire most for their creativity almost without fail are outliners (and those that aren’t are lying – they most likely keep an outline in their heads and trust their memories to keep it straight). The reason is simple – an outline takes most of the work of organizing and structuring their writing off their shoulders, which means they are free to actually be creative.

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.

]]> http://dwax.org/2007/06/13/best_practices_for_students_4_outline/feed/ 0 Best Practices for Students #3: Spell-check Is Not Your Friend! http://dwax.org/2007/06/11/best_practices_for_students_3_spell-check_is_not_your_friend/ http://dwax.org/2007/06/11/best_practices_for_students_3_spell-check_is_not_your_friend/#comments Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:18:18 +0000 dustin [Continue reading]]]> A conspiracy is afoot, my friends. Microsoft is in on it, for sure, but they’re only the public face of what may be the vastest, most insidious plot to undermine America’s credibility ever carried out. I’m pretty sure the North Koreans are in on it, and the Teachers’ Union. And MTV, definitely. Their plan: through the cunning manipulation of word processing software, particularly the spell-checking function, they hope to make Americans look stupid and awkward in front of the rest of the world.

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

]]> http://dwax.org/2007/06/11/best_practices_for_students_3_spell-check_is_not_your_friend/feed/ 2 Only the Strong (Verbs) Survive http://dwax.org/2007/06/04/only_the_strong_verbs_survive/ http://dwax.org/2007/06/04/only_the_strong_verbs_survive/#comments Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:38:42 +0000 dustin proofreading. One of the most common words used in the English language is "is" and its variants. Unfortunately, "is" signifies only existence, a quality of being, and not anything interesting about the nature of the existence being described. So it's important to use verbs that convey more meaning, that carry forward the action or ideas that make up our [Continue reading]]]> Here’s a bonus tip I left out of my recent post on proofreading. One of the most common words used in the English language is “is” and its variants. Unfortunately, “is” signifies only existence, a quality of being, and not anything interesting about the nature of the existence being described. So it’s important to use verbs that convey more meaning, that carry forward the action or ideas that make up our work. Paying special attention to the kinds of verbs you use in your writing, and replacing them with stronger verbs when proofreading, can make a big difference in the final product. Listen:

  • John was from Omaha, and was over six feet tall. He was standing in the back of the bar when I first saw him, and was glaring at a waitress who had snubbed him earlier. I was intimidated by him, but I knew he was someone I had to talk to, because he was the only one who knew who had killed Frank.
  • John came from Omaha, and stood well over six feet tall. I first noticed him standing at the back of the bar, glaring at a waitress who had snubbed him. He intimidated me, but I knew I had to speak to him because he alone knew who did in Frank.

I’m certainly no mystery writer, but the second passage does a much better job of capturing the tension and foreboding of the scene. Using forceful verbs helps you avoid the “passive voice” that Microsoft’s grammar checker is always nagging you about, and it gives you another tool besides adverbs and adjectives to flesh out your description. It also makes for more exciting, snappier prose, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that!

]]> http://dwax.org/2007/06/04/only_the_strong_verbs_survive/feed/ 0 The Art of Proofreading http://dwax.org/2007/06/01/the_art_of_proofreading/ http://dwax.org/2007/06/01/the_art_of_proofreading/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 One of the greatest frustrations that professors face is the lack of solid writing skills among some of our brightest students. To see a student who we other wise know to be smart and even articulate bury their written ideas under poor grammar, bad spelling, awkward colloquialisms, and misconstrued logic is painful, even heart-breaking. I’ve come to believe, though, that a big part of the problem is not so much that students are inherently lazy writers or that they simply don’t care enough to do well, but that they do not proofread their work, at least in part because they haven’t learned how to do it [Continue reading]]]> One of the greatest frustrations that professors face is the lack of solid writing skills among some of our brightest students. To see a student who we other wise know to be smart and even articulate bury their written ideas under poor grammar, bad spelling, awkward colloquialisms, and misconstrued logic is painful, even heart-breaking. I’ve come to believe, though, that a big part of the problem is not so much that students are inherently lazy writers or that they simply don’t care enough to do well, but that they do not proofread their work, at least in part because they haven’t learned how to do it well.

I’m using “proofread” here to encompass what are really three separate steps: revising, editing, and proofreading. Technically, proofreading is the final review of a draft for typos, dropped words, and other minor errors. The real action is in the revising – taking the original “off the top of my head” draft apart and putting it back together as a better product. I had a teacher in high school who described it as “re-visioning”, actually re-building the piece to present a new and more thought out vision.

The reality is that we know our topic better after we’ve written an essay on it, so in revising we bring that improved understanding to bear on our original thoughts. Then we can begin editing, going through the piece to see if there isn’t a better way to express each idea, or if the words we’ve chosen are really the best words we could have used. Then we can proofread to make sure there aren’t any errors that might distract a reader away from our finely honed prose.

But for classroom essays, which are usually written under a tight schedule and on topics that their authors might not feel particularly passionate about, it’s fair to consider all three as part of a single process. Here’s a few tips to make that process more effective:

  • Spellcheck is not your friend! Yes, run your word processor’s spellcheck, and pay attention to the red and green squiggles that appear as you type to indicate spelling and grammar errors, but don’t be fooled: spellcheck is a first line of defense only, and a poor one at that. Relying on spellcheck to catch all of your errors is a sure way to look like an idiot, as spellcheck will not and cannot distinguish between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”, or between “your” and “you’re”. When you have a really bad typo, spellcheck may well change the word to something else entirely, making it difficult and even impossible for your reader to tease out what you might have meant to say.
  • Wait a few days before proofreading: One of the problems with proofreading is that our brains are really not up to the job. Brains are very good at seeing patterns, and even imposing patterns where none exists (think of the shapes we see in the stars, which are really only randomly placed points of light). Your brain knows what it mean to say, and so it tends to superimpose that over the actual words on paper that make up what you actually did say. By waiting a few days from the time you finish writing before you review your work, the short-term memory of what you thought you were writing will fade and you’ll be able to approach your writing with a fresh eye.
  • Read backwards: Another tip meant to side-step your nasty brain’s tricks. When checking your spelling, you want to look at words, not sentences – but the brain is much better at digesting sentences. Reading backwards allows you to ignore whatever meaning is supposed to be expressed by the words you’re looking at and instead focus on the words themselves.
  • Read out loud: That pesky brain again! We use different parts of our brains for reading and listening. A lot of times, what looks fine to our eyes will sound awful when we force ourselves to say it out loud. This is a good way to find awkwardly phrased sentences and passages, as well as to identify run-on sentences and fragments.
  • Write crappy first drafts: This is a tip that comes up a lot when writers are facing writer’s block – just sit down and write whatever comes to mind and don’t worry bout how good it is. But it’s also good advice for proofreading: learn to embrace the crappiness of your first draft, instead of seeing it as a final product.
  • Cut it in half, and then cut it in half again: Students always ask me about word- and page-counts. I include a page-count in my essay instructions not because I want exactly “x” number of pages but to give students an idea of the depth they should cover their subject in. The real answer to “how long should my paper be” is always “as long as it needs to be”. Here’s the trick, though: we almost always write much more than we need to. It’s much, much harder to write a good short essay than a mediocre long one. Most professional authors figure they need to write about 4 – 5,000 words to get a good 1,500-word article. Drastically cutting the word count means going over every sentence, again and again, to see if there’s a way to say the same thing better and more clearly. You don’t want to cut important details, you want to trim the fat away, leaving the lean, juicy meat behind. (Feeling hungry all of a sudden?)
  • Delete every comma: Commas are, as a rule, very poorly used by English-language writers. Of course, commas are necessary, but they’re generally not as necessary as we think they are. Delete all the commas (easy with the find-and-replace function of most word processors) and then re-read your text. The places where commas are necessary will be immediately apparent, and you won’t even miss the unnecessary ones you removed.

Students often don’t understand why professors put so much stress on the form of their writing: on grammar and bibliography formatting and margins and spelling and so on. They feel that the ideas they’ve expressed are the important thing, and they’re right. But form matters – if it didn’t, students wouldn’t be toting iPods around campus, they’d settle for cheaper and uglier models. A well-designed product is not just better-looking, it performs its job better and it’s a joy to use.

The goal of writing should be to produce iPods, not cheap knockoffs with names that kind of sound similar if you don’t read them closely. There’s real-world consequences, too: I recently read the results of a survey of Fortune 500 human resources managers, and some 80-odd percent of them said they will throw out a resume or cover letter if it has even one typo. So it’s clearly a good idea to develop effective proofreading strategies while you’re developing all the other skills you’ll need in the workplace. More importantly, though, writing is a reflection of thought, and sharpening your writing skills will help sharpen your thinking skills. And that is what you’re in school for, right?

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