Composition
Computer as Writing Assistant
That computer sitting before you is
more than a fancy typewriter. (Some really young readers might be asking,
"What's a typewriter?" but bear with us.) With modern word-processing
programs and the ability of the computer to attend to more than one task at a
time, the computer can become a assistant in the writing process. If you are
still typing with two fingers, however, you must learn how to take advantage of
all the computer has to offer. It might be a good idea to call a brief time-out
in your academic courses and learn some keyboarding skills. Until
voice-recognition software becomes a more affordable reality, the ability to
use the keyboard with speed and efficiency is going to be one of the keys to
academic success. You don't want to spend hours pecking away at the keyboard
when a mini-course in keyboarding will give you the skills necessary to
keyboard like a speed-demon. And paying someone else to keyboard your paper is
not only expensive; it also means that you're not taking advantage of
everything that this technology has to offer. If you don't have time during the
regular semester, promise yourself that before another winter's intersession or
summer session passes by, you will take a course in keyboarding. You will never
regret it. There are also software packages that promise to turn you into an
executive secretary in a week, and they can be effective. Having the discipline
of a course and the encouragement of an instructor and classmates can be
helpful, though.
One of the
first things you'll learn in a keyboard class is how to SAVE the material
you're typing. Once you've learned the first basic step, it's easy to save your
document as you go along. Some software, in fact, has an automatic SAVE feature
that saves your work every few minutes. When you're done with your work, make
sure that final copies of your documents are safely "put away" in two
places — on a floppy disc and on the hard drive or on two separate floppies. Floppies
"go bad," and someday you will be very glad that you got in the habit
of saving things twice. Your instructor is not interested in what is already an
old excuse: "My floppy is corrupted." The only caution here is that
you must be careful to work with the latest saved version. Carefully label your
discs and keep your backup copy as fresh as your main floppy. Also, carry
floppy discs in a hard plastic case. If that metal slider gets bent in your
pocket or purse, that floppy is a goner, and pocket lint and floppy discs don't
get along.
If your document is really important
or private, learn to keep copies in a safe place, away from nasty weather and
electromagnetic fields (like some scissors or paperclips and those magnetic
closers on cabinet doors). Also, get in the habit of checking the disc drive
before you leave the computer station. Carefully saving your documents on a
floppy doesn't do much good if you leave it in the disc drive and the next
person who uses the lab accidentally blows away your precious text or helps
himself to a free floppy disc.
As you enter the Editing and Rewriting phases of writing your
paper and you begin to move blocks of text around and delete material or insert
new paragraphs here and there, it might be a good idea to begin to save
subsequent drafts of your paper. Label the draft files systematically and simply:
ozone_1.doc, ozone_2.doc, etc. The reason for this is that we sometimes
"blow away" something that is quite good and when we want to retrieve
it, it's gone if we constantly over-ride a single saved document. (A distinct disadvantage
of digital writing!) A high-density floppy disc should be able to hold many
versions of several text documents.
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