infobong.com

One of the things I'm writing about is the relatively high level of technical competence needed to contribute effectively to Wikipedia. For example, to flag an article for problems, a user needs to learn a special tag specific to Wikipedia that inserts special notice into the page. From time to time, I'll look down at the bottom of the screen and think, "I've been writing for hours and hours, and I'm still only up to eight pages! How did I get to be such a slow writer?" That is, until a few minutes ago. I just realized that what I thought was the double-space button in MS Word or OS X was, in fact, the one-and-a-half space button. I'm a lot further along than I thought I was.

Grading student papers, I often write comments like "MS Word should automatically insert an em dash here," when I see a hyphen where a dash should be. Years of proofreading and editing probably have me particularly attuned to em-dashes and en-dashes - at one point, I was tasked with measuring the size of periods with a pica ruler - but I don't really understand how these typesetting errors get into student papers. UT has site-wide licenses with Microsoft that extend to students, so they can get MS Office for a nominal cost. I'd be sensitive if a student said she only used Free Software, but, apart from that, there's really no excuse not to use the latest version of Word. But, then again, I apparently don't know how to use the darn application myself!