Freelance Writing Jobs | Today's Articles | Sign In

Articles
Writers
 
Browse Sections
Home Technical Writing

Precision for Writers and Editors

Dec 10, 2001 - © Steve Dunham

semicolons. Their other job is to separate groups that have items separated by commas, such as lists of cities and states. The following series is hard to understand with only commas: “West New York, NJ, New York, NY, and East New York, NY, are within twenty miles of each other.” Semicolons break up the units that are themselves divided by commas: “West New York, NJ; New York, NY; and East New York, NY; are within twenty miles of each other.”

Finally, colons and semicolons next to quotation marks and parentheses go outside those punctuation marks. We heard them perform last night (in a recital): he played “Moonlight Sonata”; she performed “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Go to …

Front Page: Big thinks

[Assistance.gif]
Help with Word

[Punc.gif]
Colon and semicolon

[screen_TOC.gif]
Word into HTML

[Incorrect.gif]
Word abuse

[Mock.gif]
House giveaway

[said.gif]
False dignity

© 2001 Analytic Services

[screen.gif]

Word into HTML

You can make web pages automatically out of Microsoft Word files—under File, Save As, choose Web Page. It will do a pretty good job of creating an HTML file that looks like your Word document. The end.

Or so I thought. Until I posted my first web pages and some of the pictures didn’t display correctly and some of the links, especially bookmarks, didn’t work. It turned out that Word had put needlessly long paths in some of the links, specifying, for example, the hard drive and folder, which didn’t exist on the web server. I had to open the HTML file and edit some of the links manually to make them work. That satisfied me for a while.

Continued below

Go to …

Front Page: Big thinks

[Assistance.gif]
Help with Word

[Punc.gif]
Colon and semicolon

[screen_TOC.gif]
Word into HTML

[Incorrect.gif]
Word abuse

[Mock.gif]
House giveaway

[said.gif]
False dignity

© 2001 Analytic Services

Then I found that the HTML files created by Word were loaded with a lot of superfluous coding. If you want a page that loads quickly and is easy to troubleshoot, this matters.

So I started writing more HTML coding myself, and, in this, Word can still be a help. I can write an article in Word and apply formatting such as italics. This way I can use the spellchecker and all Word’s other features until I’m done writing and editing. Then I put in the i and /i

The copyright of the article Precision for Writers and Editors in Technical Writing is owned by Steve Dunham. Permission to republish Precision for Writers and Editors in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Go To Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic