Category: writing and editing

Moving from print to web

Hey, it’s the middle of 2009 already. Weren’t we all supposed to be working in paperless offices by now? (Yeah, and driving to work in our flying cars, like the Jetsons.)

Well, like the flying car, the paperless office turned out to be a bill of goods, a mistaken vision of the future from days gone by.

But budget crunches and environmental concerns may be pushing us closer to a paperless workflow than many of us thought. Karine Joly‘s latest column in University Business — 2010: Print to Web Odyssey? — outlines a five-step plan for moving some of your marketing efforts from the world of print to the online realm. The entire article is worth your read, but if you’re in a rush and just want the five points, check out Karine’s blog post. You might also be interested in an upcoming webinar on the subject.

No plans are in the works for a webinar on flying cars, to my knowledge. But Karine, if you do one, I’d totally go.

Out of my Elements

When I learned (via @limbackm) that today marks the 50th anniversary of Strunk and White’s grammar primer The Elements of Style, I decided to pull my copy off the shelf and thumb through it, just for a wave of nostalgia. Problem is, it wasn’t there. Somebody stole my Strunk and White.

Or maybe it’s at home, or just plain lost. Maybe I lent it to a former student assistant who never returned it. That’s what happened to my last two copies of On Writing Well.

Thanks be to the Internet, Strunk and White lives online. Here’s one of the quotes I almost have memorized from the book.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

That’s from the section about omitting needless words. And that’s all I’m going to write about that.