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Your short cuts: my short cuts

Whether you’re using office software for work, fun, creative writing, or studying, it’s very common to not worry about learning how to do things properly, but just to launch in and start typing. How hard can it be? That’s fine, if you’re just typing a document or making a very simple spreadsheet. But when things get more complicated, documents need more formatting, and the right way to do things isn’t immediately obvious, it’s very tempting to fudge something together and hope it’ll work out in the long run.

Your short cut: don’t learn how to do it properly; just make up your own solutions.

You would not believe how many documents I’ve been sent where the writers have done this. In fact, it’s so common that I usually send clients a note to congratulate them when they’ve done something the right way.

This is not just me being over-picky or trying to persuade people to pay out for my services. I once spent seven hours – that’s SEVEN HOURS (remembering my rates vary from £10 per hour upwards) sorting out the formatting and contents page of a PhD that someone had got in a mess with. What took up most of those seven hours? Stripping out the attempts to do it right that the author had flailed around with, before calling me in.

I’m going to share some of my short cuts. They involve knowing how to do something (I’m not blowing my own trumpet here: people pay me to know how to do this stuff) and doing it properly, to save yourself time and, indeed, money.

I’m going to look at various tasks your documents need to perform (we’re mainly going to be looking at Microsoft Word here, although other wordprocessing programmes will have similar features and capabilities), how you tend to do it, so you recognise what you’re doing even if you don’t use the same words to describe the task, and then show you how to do it “properly”, i.e. the way that is most suited to the software you’re using; the way that will make it easier for you.

I might even go all daring and post some video! Not sure yet …

So, the kinds of issue I’m going to cover will include

– making a new section start on a new page

– using tabs and margins

– using heading hierarchies and creating an automatic Table of Contents

– counting particular instances in Excel

– page numbering

– saving time typing and coping with words you regularly misspell

All quite simple stuff, but you’d be truly amazed at the muddles people can get into …

I’m also planning to do a series of posts that go into more detail, for those of you who really want to know about the nuts and bolts of how to do these things. Please do get in touch if you have any issues you’ve been wrestling with that you’d like me to cover, especially any short cuts of your own that you know aren’t quite right!

Contact me via email or via my contact form.

68 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on November 9, 2011 in New skills, Organisation, Short cuts, Students, Word, Writing

Tags: errors, research, students, writing

On plagiarism

29 Jun

So … plagiarism.

We tend to think of plagiarism as “copying” – picking up chunks of text out of a book (then) or good old Wikipedia (now) and putting it in our essays and claiming it’s all written by us.

But plagiarism is really “passing other people’s work off as our own”, and this includes a lot of other things as well as copying out of books.

I’m going to talk about some examples and also about how I work with students to make sure I retain their authorship while helping them with any problems they might have with their writing.

Plagiarism includes:

Not citing your sources. In example 1, below, the author has claimed something but not said where they got it from. All sources need to be cited and you can have a look at my article on referencing to see how to do that.
Copying. You need to either put other people’s words into your own words, or quote them directly (within the text for short quotations, as an inset block of text for longer ones) and then reference them.
Having another person write your work for you. Very occasionally I get asked to rewrite an essay. A lot of companies prey on students’ academic worries and fears and try to sell them essays. If you buy and use someone else’s work like this, you are plagiarising and lying. Any qualification you gain from this has not been gained legitimately or legally.

So, when I work with an essay, dissertation or thesis, I am very careful not to rewrite anything but only to tweak grammar, punctuation and spelling and suggest where things should be sorted out. The following image shows a few examples of how I work, and one of how I DON’T work.

In Example 1, the author has not quoted their source and I’ve inserted a comment to remind them to do so.

In Example 2, there’s quite a lot wrong with spelling and grammar, but you can see that the author knows what they’re talking about. I’ve amended their mistakes, but again that’s all tracked, so they a) can see what they’ve done wrong and b) have to choose whether to accept the change themselves. By the way, the ‘s’ is changed in emphasized to make it consistent. I’ll do a post about s and z another time.

In Example 3, a Very Bad ProofReader has seen something missing and decided to add it in. In this case, rather than a few missing words, it’s a concept or part of the explanation of the actual results that’s missing. This is a small example – but the author has not written that and the proofreader shouldn’t have. I’ll suggest adding a word or two, but I wouldn’t complete something missing from the actual substance of the research or discussion.

Example 4 shows how I’d handle that same sentence. No re-writing, no suggesting – I’ve just highlighted and told them something’s missing. I’ll do the same if a sentence is mangled, incoherent and just doesn’t make sense. But I don’t write my clients’ words for them, and students shouldn’t expect their proofreaders to do so (most don’t!).