Printing Terms and Other Memorabilia

A number of years ago I think someone wrote a book entitled A Computer Is Not a Typewriter; It's a Typesetting Machine. For anyone using a word processing program it's really important to know this, because whereas many of the Adobe programs are clearly meant for use by people who understand printing terms, word processing programs tend to keep this knowledge hidden, and you can only discover it if you use the style sheet part of the program.

Printing terms I'm going to begin my discussion with printing terms and where they came from. When I was the copy editor on my university's newspaper, The American University Eagle, back in the Days of Yore, the editor and I would make the weekly trip out to the shop where the paper was set into type. I talked a lot with the woman who ran the typesetting machine. She impressed me when she told me she made more money typesetting than she did with her master's degree in English.

Type that looked rather like dies was kept in wooden trays on the upper portion of the typesetter's machine. The capital letters were stored in the trays, called cases, at the top, while the little letters were stored in the trays at the bottom, thus the common printing terms uppercase and lowercase. Newspapers and magazines did not use small caps, so when the copy editor meant for a letter to be made cap because someone had typed it lowercase, he or she would just underline it twice. In book publishing, caps are indicated with three underscores, because two mean small caps. Small caps are fonts unto themselves and not just full-size caps made smaller.

The lines of type were made out of lead, so when a newspaper wanted to fill out a column to make it align with the column it was next to on the page, they would take small slices of lead and add more space. To this day, this action is still referred to as leading. For most text type, the leading between the lines is indicated by a figure measured in points. Points are fractions of a larger measure called a pica. These days, 6 picas equal 1 inch, but in the old days, before computers, 6 picas equaled slightly less than 1 inch. Then as now, there are 12 points in every pica. I had to buy a special ruler for my typography class that measures in computer type sizes, not the traditional picas and points. If the typesetter wanted to make a short line fill a line in a column, she would kern the type, meaning she would add little pieces of lead between the letters.

(The following information, while commonly known, is borrowed here specifically from Designing with Type: A Basic Course in Typography by James Craig and William Bevington, published by Watson-Guptill Publications in 1999.) Lowercase type is usually measured by something called the x-height, because the x hits both the baseline and meanline of the type. The bottom of the x rests on the baseline while the top hits the meanline, an imaginary line that runs along the top of most lowercase letters.

"Typeface refers to the specific design of an alphabet. . . . Each typeface is identified by a name," frequently that of the person who designed it, or other considerations. "Traditionally, a font [my italics] was one size of one type style in a particular typeface." "Font" is used today is used more loosely and no longer refers specifically to one size of type. It is very easy to confuse the terms for font and typeface, and people, including me, do it all the time. The easiest way to remember the difference is to recall that Garamond is a typeface, while Garmaond roman is a font, Garamond italic is a font. In the days of hot metal, they would each have their own cases of dies. Nowadays, the computer eliminates the need for such rigid definitions and divisions.

The type itself is measured in points; however, it is measured from the baseline of one line to the baseline of the line below, expressed as B/b. Thus, 12/14 points means that the letters are 12 points in height with 14 points being occupied by both type and space; in other words, there are only 2 points of space between each line. For simplicity, word processing programs usually use only the most common sizes of body type, such as 8 pt, 9 pt, 10 pt, 11 pt, 12 pt, 14 pt, 16 pt, and so on up to 72 pt. In order to change the default space between the lines of type, one must go to the style menu in the program and reset it by hand; otherwise it will always be either auto or 12 pt. In typesetting programs such as InDesign, there is much more flexibility in the sizes of type and amounts of leading between lines of type.

When I speak of the height of the type it's important to understand that the measure is calculated by the tallest letter in the typeface, usually the tallest capital letter. You measure from the top of that letter to the bottom to obtain the type size. Fortunately, most of us don't have to do this; the computer does it for us. But it often can help to understand what you're doing at a keyboard when you select a typeface for your project.

Rules for better typesetting Newspapers continue to lead out columns and kern type, but magazines and books generally do not. Both noticeable kerning and extra lead between lines are considered in these media as bad typography. When computer typesetting houses began taking over from letterset houses (or hot metal typesetting, as it was called) we had a terrible time getting them to align type across a spread (two pages side by side), meaning no leading, and using kerning with great care. Now that typesetting has taken another change in development and moved to the desktop, one sees the same errors in typography all over again. (There are exceptions to this situation, as when the columns are very narrow and it is difficult to align type or fit enough words into a line to fill it out. But these should be challenges to the designer, not things to ignore. Sometimes I think it's the case that these new typesetters simply don't know the old rules about good page makeup anymore.)

Typewriter FAILs I was horrified to learn that typing instructors are still teaching people to type by adding two spaces after a period and a colon. I believe that was the point of the book I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. In print, the space after a period and colon is just one space, as it is after all other punctuation marks. You will find that no matter what font you choose for your document, especially for a resume, it'll look a lot better if you only add one space after a period or colon.

For anything you choose to make on a computer, you should never use an even-space font such as Courier or American Typewriter. These fonts are not proportioned, and they look like old-fashioned typewriters used to. Basically, the i takes up no more room than the m. In all the other fonts you can choose from, you get proportioned type, where the m is always going to be larger than the i.

Setting tabs efficiently All word processing programs come with tabs automatically set at every half inch. It isn't at all necessary to use this setup. You can, through using style sheets, set up however many tabs you need, placed as you need them placed (left, centered, or right) by entering the measure on the ruler that you can make visible on your page using the "Page Layout" selection and by selecting to have the rulers show. Thus, if you need two tabs, you set them and don't have to space every half inch across the page to get the text where you want it. And if you want to format your page so that certain elements start from a right-hand tab, you can set it that way. This one step alone saves hundreds of unnecessary keystrokes in any document you make. Things you type actually align perfectly. It's worth the trouble to figure it out.

A word about fonts Here is a paragraph I've added from the New York Times, David Brooks's column for December 7, 2010: "People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts."

There are two types of fonts you should not use, say, on Facebook or for e-mails or other kinds of normal writing: YOU SHOULD NOT USE ALL CAPS, nor should you use all italics. Both fonts are difficult to read. Selection of fonts is all about ease in reading, so you should try to use fonts that are inviting and easy to read. There are many exceptions to this rule, of course, because book designers often use different fonts to differentiate elements in the book's design from one another. But that isn't really what I'm talking about. 

• If you want to make a flier for some event your church or organization is sponsoring, avoid putting the important information in all caps or italic. 
• Avoid using type that is too small, and so on. 
• If you are writing a cover letter for e-mailing a resume, it is of utmost importance that you don't use all caps to write it, and that's the sort of usage I'm talking about.

To learn more about how these different elements work, you should try using the style palettes in your word processing program to set your type size and leading. Now that I've given you some basics, you'll be able to interpret and understand the terms used in the palettes to give you flexibility and choice.

Spelling Questions, with Some Answers

Tonight I'm planning to work on a novella written by my building manager (of all things!). I've completed about half of it and I'm pleased that he's not a bad writer. It's much more pleasant to work with writers who know how to put together a sentence than the ones who don't and call it their "style," or people who simply don't know the difference between good and bad writing because they never paid much attention to the rules. All those rules! And so complicated!

Well, yes. English complicated, but it is also capable of expanding to infinity, something like pi. Words come and go in popularity, but English can always make room for more. We have no shame about adopting words from other languages and giving them our own, Americanized pronunciation. We aren't particular about foreign and domestic words, and as they join our everyday speech, we use them with pleasure and enthusiasm. We even invent words that never existed before someone in our country said them: no Greek roots, no Latin roots, no French or Middle English roots. Just words that came from us but within a short time we all understand and use them.

Yet there are rules. Some words must be spelled correctly or they mean something quite different from what the speaker or writer intended. Those are the words people have problems with and why spelling is so very important, even for a made-up word like Blam!

I once worked with an author who insisted that the thing over his fireplace was a mantle. The copy editor had changed it to mantel. Every time I saw a new stage of proof, the author insisted on restoring his original version, and with increasing exasperation and many exclamation points, demanded his preferred spelling. I trotted around the his editor's office and explained that the thing over the fireplace was a mantel, while a great sweeping cloak was a mantle. In context, his spelling made no sense. She agreed with me, but what could she do? Finally I told her that I would not leave a spelling error in the book, and somehow I also learned that this author tended to overindulge in alcoholic beverages, so when the book went to press, the correct spelling was in place. Strangely enough, the author did not write a letter accusing us of duplicity for spelling the word correctly. One of those mysteries of publishing that remains unsolved to this day.

For people who are self-publishing, things are more complicated. For instance, if you decide you want your chapter numbers spelled out and you haven't checked with the Chicago Manual of Style to see how to handle the upper/lowercase problem that exits in the decision, you may find yourself spelling them like this: Chapter Twenty-One, Chapter Thirty-Two, and so on. The problem here is that twenty-one, thirty-two, and ninety-nine are all permanently hyphenated compound words: two words that equal one thing. So they need to be capped only at the first letter: Chapter Twenty-one, Chapter Thirty-three, and so on.

(Tomorrow I'm going to write a special section on publishing terms—where they came from, what they mean, and why a computer is not a typewriter; it's a typesetting machine. For now, just hang in there. I think you'll get the meaning from the context of the sentence you're reading.)

Compound words are one of the most complex subjects in spelling. When is a word a compound, when not; when is it a temporary hyphenated compound; when is it a permanent hyphenated compound [Hint: Use the dictionary!]? Why permanent? Why temporary? And what about words that were once permanently hyphenated only to morph into completely closed up words (such as lifestyle)? Frankly, I think it's such a complicated subject that I'm not going to tackle it in one blog entry. Over the coming weeks, I'm planning to devote individual entries to discussing them.

For tonight, I'm doing that real work to help this budding author improve his prose. Good luck to anyone who reads this post and forages ahead, through the spelling jungle our language creates. Have fun. May the Force be with you.

Sunday Digression

Today I had a panic run for my car, scared I'd parked where the city was planning to do street cleaning on Friday, but thank the parking space gods, no ticket decorated my windshield or side mirror. Fate smiled on my car, for a change, but probably not for long.

I thought I saw on a weather forecast last night that it was supposed to warm up a bit today. Warm up from what to what? I still needed my gloves and hat, so I ran back home and picked up my mail. A notice to pay some money for earlier parking tickets awaited me. One year I paid $554 in parking ticket payments. I felt personally responsible for supporting the city. Nowadays, though, they are giving us more than 12 hours' notice of street sweeping, as they were when I first came here.

Well, in Chicago, it's considered progress. What can I say?

Remember: I can help you put together a great resume or proofread your self-published book for $22 an hour, flat rate. No mysterious charges for pencils or Post-its, no "service fees," and for most projects, postage is extra while electronic files come and go for free. I use the U.S. Postal Service generally, but if you want overnight service or any other special treatment, you can have it, along with the receipt for what it cost. I ask for a down payment in advance of the work, based on what it is and how long I think it'll take me to complete the job. Special privileges accrue for repeat clients.


Coming up this week:

• More advice about resumes
• More discussion about semicolons
• More, more, more . . . of everything

A Skills Resume

I said in my first entry that I would help people with their resumes, and in several entries I've mentioned subjects that pertain to resumes. But in this post, I want to talk about one particular kind of resume, one that is based on jobs that all have skills in common.

If you are trying to structure a chronological resume, one that is based on the job titles you've held, with the jobs listed chronologically, you would use a form where each job is featured, and the duties you fulfilled for each position, any honors or awards you received, or any particular kinds of praise you were singled out to receive would all be structured similarly.

(I'm apologizing in advance for certain quirks in this blog program. I could not get it to give me even space above and below heads, so to get rid of some of the obnoxiousness, I eliminated a line space after the heads, but on your resume, you should try to have a line space.)

But what happens, for instance, if you work in the restaurant business, particularly in the kitchen? The restaurant business is still one of the most open types of job you can go into, if you like it. You can take a job as a dishwasher, knowing absolutely nothing about kitchen work, and you will be taught by various people who work with you to do chores they need help with. One of the first responsibilities you might be given is food prep, along with your normal dishwashing duties. Prepping means washing, cutting, slicing, cleaning, or whatever is needed for the foods the chef plans to serve for the upcoming meal. You might be asked to wash ten heads of lettuce and run the leaves through a salad spinner. If you got the dirt out of the lettuce and there were no customer complaints about grit or bugs, you might find yourself washing lettuce every day.

But what usually happens is that you are taught how to use knives, how to stir a pot of stew or soup, how to cut vegetables for certain dishes they serve, and so on. Every day you go to work, you may be asked to do two things you've done before and one you need to be taught. But the method is to train you to dig in and help the staff get the orders to the customers in a timely fashion.

In a larger establishment you might be promoted to doing nothing but prep and not doing any dishwashing again, unless the dishwasher called in sick. In this way, you can learn each station in a professional kitchen or in a diner or some other type of eatery and advance.

However, if your employer goes under, suddenly you need a new job and how do you find one? If you're used to making burritos, how can you apply for a job making crepes? What a lot of people do is go to work for specialty temp agencies that send you out to this kitchen or that one for a short-term gig or a long-term one. Suddenly, in the space of a month, you've worked at ten different places, and if you do the temping for any length of time, you will have worked at dozens of places, many of them more than once. So the chronological resume is no longer of much use to you. If you simply list the temp agency you worked for, it doesn't give a prospective employer any idea of the kinds of jobs you did, and listing all the places themselves could become a spider web of overlapping assignments--lunches at one place and dinners at another.

If you're in this position, a skills-based resume can be the answer. Here is a possible template for such a resume:

OBJECTIVE
To find a position where my six years' of experience in the restaurant business can fulfill the business objectives of my employer

[You should always include an objective, and it should always be worded in such a way to make it clear that you want to contribute your effort to your employer's success. It's always a phrase, no period, and avoid saying "I." Never say anything about needing a job or something to the effect you want a job to make money. These things are obvious. The business owner wants to know specifically how you can contribute to his/her success. In one phrase.]


SKILLS
[Since all the positions in a restaurant utilize similar skills and responsibilities, you can make a list of the six or eight most important skills you've learned and give them as a bulleted list right here. The absolute best place to go for the best wording and most thorough summaries of any kind of job is http://online.onetcenter.org. On the splash page, or home page, go to Find Occupations. The first entry you'll see, on the upper left side, is "Keyword or O*NET.SOC code." In that box, type the term for the most prestigious position you held, such as "saucier." As it so happens, there's only one place it takes you to: Cooks, Restaurant. If you click on that, you'll see a bulleted list of duties for a saucier.


However, if you want something more inclusive and general, you can use the terms "dishwasher" or "food prep" or "grill man" or something else you may have done. You will then get a list of all the different positions that are part of the organization of a restaurant kitchen. 


When you use O*Net, you can copy and paste the items you need, but you'll have to customize them to your own preference in order of jobs and maybe even choice of words. Just make sure you spell anything you add correctly. These listings are from Department of Labor sources for all the different kinds of jobs there are in our society, so you can use them as they are without fear of plagiarism. If you make your resume in Microsoft Word, which I recommend, there are buttons for setting up bulleted lists, and you should use them.]

• Inspect and clean food preparation areas, such as equipment and work surfaces, or serving areas to ensure safe and sanitary food-handling practices.
• Ensure food is stored and cooked at correct temperature by regulating temperature of ovens, broilers, grills, and roasters.

[These two items were taken verbatim. I think they sound a bit wordy, and I'm sure most sauciers would know how to word these responsibilities better, but I did this to give you an idea of how the process works. Note that I copied and pasted, and the entries came in blue and in Arial. 


When you are working on a resume, avoid Times or Times Roman and Arial. They are so common that when people on the other end see them they could just toss your resume in the trash rather than read it. On the other hand, don't choose an italic font or a really fancy one. Stick with the ones that come with the program.]


EMPLOYMENT
[Here, instead of trying to make a chronological list, just set up a one-, two-, or three-column list and give the names and addresses of all the restaurants where you worked. Give a supervisor's name only if you have the first and last name of the person; otherwise, leave it out. Give city, state (as a Zip code abbreviation), and Zip code; phone number if you have it. Do not give intersections, approximate locations, or any other nonspecific way of expressing an address. If you cannot be exact, put nothing. The best way to resolve the problem, though, is to use Google maps to find the place. If that fails, put nothing, but be aware that it counts against you should anyone check. If you can, buy a small notebook to keep track of all the places you've worked, how to spell their names, and their exact addresses and phone numbers.]


Finally, do not list your references on the resume. Do not put "References available on request." Instead, type your references on a separate sheet of paper and when the prospective employer asks for references, have it with you to give to the interviewer.

EDUCATION
Give a simple list of your education, for as high as you went. If you graduated high school, give the name of the school and the city or town where it's located. If you got a GED, give the name of the place where you earned it and omit any mention of the high school you attended.

If you earned a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science, give the name and location of the granting institution. Do not bother to give the name of your high school. If you started your graduate work but did not finish it, give the name of the school you attended, years of attendance, and leave out any mention of a degree. If you started college and dropped out after a month, leave it off your resume. This advice goes for undergraduate as well as graduate work. You just look like a person who can't stick with a job or responsibility. If you got a certificate from someplace like the Culinary Institute of America, definitely include it.

Do list any honors or awards you have in your field under a head for HONORS AND AWARDS or something similar. If you are/were a member of a professional organization, union, or hold an office in your church, put that down. Under a head for VOLUNTEER ACTIVITIES, list anything you do such as work at the local food bank, work at the food pantry at your church, deliver hot meals to shut-ins, and so on. These special activities help you look employable. If you coach your child's sports team, likewise.

In closing, I hope this form of resume will help people who have only performed one kind of work all their adult lives. The one thing you want to do not want in your resume is a lot of repetition. Remember, you have 60 seconds to make a good impression!

Happy Thanksgiving Digression

Today is not only Thanksgiving, and I not only have a dinner to prepare, it's also what would have been my maternal grandparents' 101st wedding anniversary. So Happy Anniversary, Herb and Minnie Thrall. I still think of you often and love you dearly.

Lie, Lay, They're, There, Their, etc.

I recall with clarity Bob Dylan's song "Lay, Lady, Lay" because there it is, one of the most common grammatical errors I hear people saying. Unless Bob picked her up and put her on the bed, "lay" isn't the correct verb. If he's encouraging her to come to bed with him, it should be "Lie, Lady, Lie." Maybe he didn't want to use "lie" since it sounds as if he's encouraging her to tell lies, but nonetheless, that's what it should have been. Just as it should be when you want your dog to lie down. You don't say "lay down." In order to "lay" anything, you must pick it up an put it down somewhere. It's a transitive verb for that reason.

I'm going to lay this magazine on the table while I lie down to take a nap. "Lie" is intransitive.

They're coming to dinner, meaning they are coming to dinner. It's a contraction.

There are six people lying on the floor. Pronoun. (Look at it this way: Anytime there is any tense of the verb to be, both subject and predicate must equal each other. You never have an object when you use this verb; you always have a predicate. If you picture the verb as an equals sign [=], you'll get a good insight about how it works.)

Their coats are slung in a pile in the corner. Meaning the coats belong to them; it's possessive.

There's a joke about a woman who visits her friend, who happens to have one of those German shepherds that likes to smell people's crotches. "Lay down," she keeps telling the nosy dog, with no results.

Her friend comes in the room to get her coat so they can leave, and the woman says, "I've been telling your dog to lay down and he just keeps pestering me. Doesn't he understand any commands?"

"Yes, but you'll find he responds much better to 'Lie down,' than to 'Lay down.'" Needless to say, she had the pleasure of being able to stick her nose a little bit up in the air, knowing that her dog knew better English than her friend.

Other Mix-ups

Here's another common one: its, possessive; it's, contraction for it is. Since most possessives are formed by adding 's to the word, this exception to the rule causes endless confusion. "It's my coat but it used to be my sister's. When she wore it, its lining dragged underneath the fabric of the coat, and she was too lazy to fix it or have someone else fix it."

Then and than. I said, "My dog is smarter than yours," then the other dog bit my leg. One is a comparison, the other is a preposition. I think a lot of the time the mix-up is caused by a typing error, but not noticed because the spelling and sounds of the two words are so similar. Many words in English have the same sounds but quite different meanings. Sometimes they are spelled very similarly; other times their spelling differs quite a lot but they are pronounced alike. Or in some cases, mispronounced alike.

If any reader knows of more examples, please feel free to contribute to the list.

Michael Pritchard's water filter turns filthy water drinkable | Video on TED.com

Michael Pritchard's water filter turns filthy water drinkable | Video on TED.com