Book/Web Site Reviews
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Online Editing
By Thomas Sura
Effective Onscreen Editing: New tools for an Old Profession by Geoff Hart. 2007. Diaskeuasis Publishing: Pointe-Claire, Quebec. pp.711. ISBN: 978-0-9783227-0-0. URL: http://www.geoff-hart.com
This book provides many useful strategies for managing and editing digital documents. It acts as a digital help manual, conveying accessible strategies and how-to instructions for writers and editors who find themselves working more with computers than with papers and pens.
One of the most useful attibutes of this book is its format. As an ebook, it's readily available when you need it most: at your computer. In addition, the pages of the book are formatted in landscape (wide) instead of portrait (tall), so you don't have to scroll up and down when you're reading. Each page fits nicely onto a laptop or desktop screen. In addition to the page layout, the ebook also features a clickable table of contents, which makes it fast and easy to find and focus on the information you need the most. Finally, as an ebook, Effective Onscreen Editing is completely searchable. There's no need to flip through hundreds of pages trying to locate one simple tip. Just do a quick search, apply an electronic bookmark, and you can find the information again whenever you need it.
While the formatting makes the book itself useful, the content provides editors with professional strategies as well as how-to instructions. As a professional strategy, Hart includes a section on how and why an editor should produce an electronic style sheet. According to Hart, style sheets record the decisions editors make about the documents they are working on. These decisions can include the style guidelines applied to the document, problematic words or phrases, and even alternative options for the client. Hart argues that by creating this reference document, editors are free to focus on the work ahead of them rather than wasting time trying to figure out how they handled a problematic phrase the last time it appeared.
In addition to professional strategies like these, Hart provides plenty of simple instructions for using word processors like Microsoft Word effectively. Although the book contains several tips and tricks for novice users, like how to magnify the text so that it is easier to read, it also contains many useful instruction sets for advanced users. For example, Hart provides detailed instructions on how to effectively edit HTML and xHTML content without disrupting the tags. Hart's instructions provide editors with a process for making the tags visible so that editors do not disrupt them but also visually altered so that the tags themselves do not disrupt the editor's work. While this is a multi-step process, Hart also provides an extensive section on recording macros, or mini-programs, to help editors automate the work.
Despite all of the great design features and useful content, the book contains remarkably few visual aids. While this fact doesn't diminish the value of the strategies and processes that Hart outlines, it can make things difficult for users who prefer visual confirmation that they are following the steps correctly.
In the end, Effective Onscreen Editing provides not only editors but also anyone who spends time composing and editing documents on their computers with a collection of usable knowledge that will help them accomplish their work fast and effectively.
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Tom Sura works in the English department at Purdue University.