A coule years ago, I found a flyer in my campus mailbox, from one academic publisher or another telling me how to respond to students’ complaints about textbook prices. The thing is, publishers want you to buy textbooks new, at full price; if they could, they’d outlaw the trade in used textbooks altogether. Even the Text and Academic Authors Association, of which I am a member, takes a strong stance against the sale of used textbooks which, after all, mean less royalties for authors.

But that’s not fair. Our audience as academic authors — and the clientele of academic publishers — are college students, many of them struggling to keep their heads above water. I teach some of my classes at a community college, where tuition is low — it is the cost of textbooks that causes many of my students to drop or to fail (because they try to go without books). If you’re writing for or publishing for college students, you have to respond at least a little to their needs — not act the role of the self-righteous victim because students naturally try to find the best deal they can, and not push unnecessary books into circulation when the ones published last year, or even 10 years ago, are still perfectly fine. How much does Introductory Physics change in the 2 years between editions anyway?!

I make sure my textbooks are available in the bookstore, but I also try to find links to discounted or used copies online, and encourage students to find the cheapest textbook prices they possibly can. And I feel fine about that — my job is to teach social science, not to market the bookstore. At the end of the day, fairness counts.

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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