Editing, Presenting, and Anal Retenting

Editing, Presenting and Anal Retenting Thursday Bram, Christopher Swenson Center for Information Security University of Tulsa 600 South College Ave, Tulsa, OK 74104

Overview
Editing skills
Publications
Anal retentive bits and pieces

Manuals
Chicago Manual of Style
Excellent reference for all things about setting text
Elements of Typographic Style , by Robert Bringhurst
Best text for typesetting
Writing for Computer Science , by Justin Z obel
Good book for more technical writing
Elements of Style , Strunk and White
Classic, cheap, small

Writing: the Three Cs
Clear
Don’t use difficult vocabulary
Unless it is necessary; if so, define it
No ambiguity
Concise
Shorter is almost always better
But don’t add ambiguity
Consistent
Be consistent in language, arguments and formatting

Writing Tips
Especially for papers, write in third person
Use the academic “we” if necessary, but never “I” or “you”
Outline your paper ahead of time
Outlining gives you an idea of where you're going and what resources you need
Define any technical or difficult terms at the beginning of your paper
Vary your word choice

Common Mistakes
Loose / lose
Its / it’s
They’re / their / there
Then / than
Effect / affect
You’re / your
Different than / different from
Could of / would of

The Possessive – Just for Dr. Hale
Chicago , 7.17–7.30
Possessives: ’s for everything, except
Plural in form, singular in meaning
Politics’, species’, United States’, National Academic of Sciences’
Ends in “eez” sound
Euripedes’, Xerxes’, Ganges’
Unpronounced “s”
Descartes’, marquis’,
For …’ sake
righteousness’, goodness’
Not hard and fast: can just omit for any word ending in “s”

More on e.g., etc.
i.e. = id est = “it is”, “in other words”
e.g. = exempli gratia = “for the sake of example”
Always use commas after (i.e., like now)
When using e.g., i.e., and so forth, never end it with “etc.” – it’s implied
etc. = et cetera = “and the rest”

Always Proofread
Run a spell-checker
If possible, have someone else look it over
If not, try some of the following:
Read paragraphs in reverse order
Read one line at a time
Print out a copy and highlight any words that are commonly mistaken

Cite Your Sources
Know where your facts come from
Cite consistently, regardless of style used
Include all the information someone would need to find that source
For papers, the minimum number of references is 10

Example Citation
J. Smith, Analysis of Networking Procedures , Addison-Wesley, Crawfordsville, Indiana, 2005.
Included is the name of the author, the name of the publication (article name and journal name), page numbers, the publisher’s name and location and the date published
If citing material from the Web, cite the URL
Book titles, journal titles should be italicized
Article names in quotes
Journal volume numbers in bold, issue in parentheses
Artificial Intelligence 7 (1)

It’s Plagiarism …
If you don’t give credit when you use another person’s idea, opinion or theory
If you don’t give credit use facts, graphs, statistics or other pieces of information that are not common knowledge
If you don’t give credit for a direct quotation or paraphrase of another person’s work

Style
Always conform to the standard style
Word limits, text size and formats are all there for a reason
When in doubt, ask for a sample or a template
Assume that copies of any paper, presentation, etc. will be given to other people
Must be understandable without you present

Presentation Tips
Bullets are helpful
Each bullet should be a complete thought
Don’t rely on PowerPoint, except for displaying images
Don’t just read off your slides
Use easy to read figures
Always use easy-to-read text
Use strong colors, especially for text
Avoid animations, neon colors and sillyness
Try to keep bullets to one line

Letters
Every letter should have a header
Date (no abbreviations)
Addressee and Address (Name, Title, Company, Street Address, City, ZIP)
Address letters to an individual
Use Mr., Ms. or the appropriate title
All letters begin with “Dear”
End letters with “Sincerely” or a similar closing
Leave a space for a signature and type your name

Email
Emails should not necessarily be less informal than a letter
Always use the “Subject” field
Refer to a specific project or connection
Avoid using the words “Urgent” or “Important”
Be professional
Do not abuse the Caps Lock key
(Sunday is INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!)
It’s email, not e-mail

Spacing
Em – space equal to the font size (12 pt font = 12 pt)
En – half of an em
Thick – 1/3 of an em
Hair – 1/5–1/6 of an em
Thin – a little smaller
Word spacing should be 1/3 to 1/4 of an em
After a period:
Ends a sentence, either 1–1.5 word spaces
Otherwise, 1 word space (Mr. Smith)
Kerning – spacing after a character
Special kerning between certain pairs is good, like Te

Dashes
Hyphens (-)
End-of-line, hyphenated words
En-dashes (–)
Ranges (pp. 22–30)
A relationship (Muslim–Christian relations)
Grammatically (Mr. Smith – a nice guy – something …)
Spaces before, afters
Em-dashes (—)
Grammatically (no spaces, thin spaces, full spaces)
Triple-em-dash for bibliographies
Minus (-)
Negative numbers
Figure dash
Placeholder for numbers

Miscellaneous
Ellipsis (…) is a special character
’”  ’ ” (hair space)
Ligatures – special pairs of letters
Typically, in English, ff, fi, ffi, fl, etc
Unnecessary to use ®, ™, etc. in papers
Use plain “Microsoft Word”
Slashes “read” from top to bottom
/ = “forward slash” or “slash”
= “backslash”
All caps things should be put in small caps, if possible
The sign said: WARNING: DO NOT ENTER
7 AM , or 7 a.m.
No space between initials in a name
J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis

Fonts
Serif – “boots” on the bottom and tops of some letters
This font is serif’d
Leftover from the original pens used to write Latin
Good for anything more than a few lines
Becomes illegible at small sizes
Slab-serif (more modern), regular serif (more classic)
Sans Serif – no “boots”
Easy to read at any size, but a bit difficult to read for long
Good for short things and very small things (headlines, captions, text in drawings and figures)

Sizes and Measures
72 points (pts) = 6 picas (pcs) = 1 inch
Screen resolution: 72–100 dpi
Paper resolution: 300–2400 dpi
Font size (e.g., 12 pt) = height of ascenders, descenders, and x-height
Also height of left-parenthesis (
Distance between two lines is usually 1.2 times the font size
12 pt size  14.4 pt line skip

Common Fonts
Times ( or worse, Times New Roman )
Palatino ( Book Antiqua )
Century (New Century Schoolbook)
Helvetica (bad imitation, Arial )

Comic Sans is Evil
Comic Sans is overused
Problems
Wobbly baseline
Poor kerning
The childish, “cute” feature is way overused
R ésumés
Medical forms
Tests
Signage
Euro symbol
WoBblLe Calculus I €

Final Words About Fonts
Use what looks good, clean and professional
The key is to actually look and care
Some fonts created for the screen
Verdana, Tahoma, Calibri

Typesetting Code
Use fixed-width fonts at a smaller size
Courier New, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is free
Embed in documents
Use bold for keywords ( for i in list )
Italics for comments
Also use fixed-width fonts for
File names
Command-line programs
Hexadecimal numbers
Program output

Alignment
Ragged right – like this presentation (left-aligned)
Okay for short works and web pages
Justified – flush on both sides
Anything more than a page or so in length
Centered and ragged left (right-aligned)
Use sparingly
Side-note: double spacing is worthless if someone isn’t going to be editing with a pen
Makes text harder to read, wastes paper

Graphic Formats
Vector-based formats
Graphics rebuilt by redrawing them (lines, boxes, etc)
Great for figures, poor for photos
Postscript formats: EPS, PS, PDF
Other formats: WMF, EMF, SVG
Raster-based formats
Rows of pixels
JPEG images should only be used for images
Lossy (takes advantage of defects in the human eye)
Compresses geometric objects poorly
PNG is good for non-photographic images (screenshots!)
Lossless
If it’s going in a paper, go ahead and make it grayscale

JPEG
A little about lossy compression

Lossless vs. Lossy PNG: 49,336 bytes JPEG: 48,815 bytes

Raster vs. Vector
JPEG Vector (EMF)
~60K 31K

Editing Programs
Microsoft Word sucks
Good for text, bad for layout, bad for tables
Kerning turned off by default
Poor support for advanced typesetting features
Poor hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm
Poor support for non-TrueType fonts
TrueType fonts use quadratic Bezier curves (Postscript / OpenType fonts use cubic – much cleaner)
If you are going to use Word, use it properly
Adobe InDesign
Good, but poorly designed for documents
TeX / LaTeX
Best for science and mathematics
Fairly easy to use
Very difficult to use properly

Graphic Editing
Microsoft Visio
Decent, but dropped support for EPS export
Fairly large diagrams
Dia is a free mostly compatible replacement
Illustrator
Not as geared towards networks
True book-quality figures
Photoshop
No substitute (GIMP is only okay)
*DO NOT USE IT FOR DRAWING FIGURES*

Rules of Thumb for Figures and Graphics
Tables are good
Vertical rules are very bad
Lines should be 1pt thick or more, if possible
Font – sans serif and bold (Helvectica, Verdana, Tahoma are okay)
Learn to use Alignment, Distribution
Avoid shading and gradients
Makes a good figure look great
Look in professionally-created computer books for examples of good graphics

Choose the Right Format
Online viewing
XML, HTML, RTF, Word
Documents (online or printed)
RTF, Word, PDF
Printed
PDF, RTF, Word
PDF is the only true archival format
Open standard, everything embedded

Editing, Presenting, and Anal Retenting

by caswenson on May 17, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 1

Statistics

Editing, Presenting, and Anal Retenting — Presentation Transcript