It’s good timing, the week before releasing a novel titled Expectation, to be talking about the unexpected in the life of a writer. Really, though, the flaws in a manuscript shouldn’t be unexpected at all. They’re perfectly predictable, and the solution is one we’ve known about for a very long time: editors.

Finding Another Pair of Eyes

I know a thing or two about editing. I’ve been playing that role for a while. As an English major in college, I got the opportunity to look over all my friends’ papers before they got turned in (joy). And as a technical writer, it’s an everyday part of my job.

We’ve got a rule of thumb in this industry that for every thousand words in a document, you need another pair of eyes to review it if you want to catch all the critical errors. It’s an idea we take pretty seriously.

I came up with the idea for this blog post, though, when I was doing some hobby editing. See, I recently convinced my writer friend Joshua Unruh to start a blog. He actually started out by agreeing to do monthly comic book reviews for the Consortium website, and then decided to go ahead and maintain a blog of his own in between those offerings.

Knowing Where You’re Going

After I provided him a pretty detailed markup of his first submission to the Consortium site (where I’m the Chief Editor), he felt like he would really benefit from getting that sort of markup on all his posts (at least for a little while), and I saw the opportunity to train him to make reliably good material for his monthly reviews, so I agreed.

It worked, too. Every week he’d send me something to review, and every week I had less and less to say. He picked up the “internet voice,” learned to break his paragraphs up into bulleted lists, and started adding headings to guide the reader through his articles.

Still, every week there was at least one paragraph that I had to go in and gut, sometimes reworking it completely. A couple weeks ago he expressed regret at that — that he still managed to put such broken sentences into his blog posts, even after a month of detailed feedback from me.

The problem, I explained to him, wasn’t in his writing. It was in his knowing. See, when he started that paragraph, he knew exactly where he was going to end up. The reader, though, didn’t have a clue. That was precisely why the reader was reading it in the first place — to figure out what Joshua was going to say.

In that particular case, he had independent clauses spilled all over the page that made excellent supporting evidence once you’d gotten to the thesis, but the thesis came three lines farther down the paragraph and in the meantime this was nothing but gibberish.

Honestly, that’s the same problem I had with Gods Tomorrow and Expectation. That’s precisely why I found myself having to rewrite endings so close to my publication date — because I’d written the story with an understanding where it was going, without fully understanding how much of that my readers didn’t know.

Editing Well

And that is why it takes so many extra pairs of eyes to spot all the problems. An editor’s job is to read like a reader — to read each word as it comes to them, building only on the information that has come before, instead of giving it credit for the information that’s going to come later.

It’s easy to forget about that (whether you’re the editor or the editee). It’s easy to think the editor’s job is to perfect the message, to spot every possible problem, but that’s either unrealistically demanding or aggravatingly meddlesome. The editor’s job isn’t to find the right way to say what you want to say.

The editor’s job is just to find what you’re actually saying. If they can read like a reader, if they can look at your message and tell you how it’s going to sound to an uninitiated reader, then they can tell you exactly what you need to fix.

How is up to you. But the when and where and what…that’s what editors are for. And if your editor tells you the ending doesn’t quite make sense, that you need to add something somewhere to bring it all together, my advice is that you listen.

Early. And often. Because the alternative is no fun at all.

Changing Orientation

By this point, I really do think you know how to use section breaks in Microsoft Word, though. So instead of spending a lot of time on that, I’m going to tell you where and how to adjust your page setup elements. Just remember that, for each one, when you make changes you can either make changes for the whole document, or just within the current section.

Modifying page orientation is a really straightforward example. If you want a document that consists mostly of Portrait Letter pages filled with text, but occasionally switches to Landscape Letter pages filled with landscape-oriented photographs, you would need to insert a section break before and after each of the pages you wanted in Landscape, then click somewhere inside the page and change the setting for that section only.

To do that, navigate to the Page Setup controls. In older versions of Word, you do that from the main menu by selecting File | Page Setup, which opens a new dialogue box. In newer versions, you can simply click on the Page Setup tab at the top of the screen to open a ribbon which contains all the same controls.

Make sure the Apply To dropdown box say “This section,” make sure your cursor is inside the page you want rotated, and then just click the Landscape orientation button. Just like that, you’ve applied a section-specific setting to manage page layout.

Maintaining Usable Margins

Then, of course, there’s margins. I spent a lot of time yesterday waxing romantic about page margins, but what do you expect? Spend as much time thinking about page margins as I do, and you’ll either end up loving them or hating them. Same goes for typos (hate), em dashes (love), paragraph styles that automatically jump to the top of a page (love), and publishing guidelines that require every chapter to start on an odd-numbered page (hate).

Oh, the glamorous life of a Tech Writer.

I think the only guideline I gave yesterday was that your margins should be “generous.” That’s not very specific, but it’s hard to give a fixed value across the board. A 1″ margin creates a much different effect on a sheet of Statement-sized paper than it does on 11″ x 17″.

It’s a handy reference point, though. 1″ margins all the way around are pretty standard on Letter-sized paper. If you switch to Legal (which is a lot taller), you might add a quarter inch to top and bottom. If your page is smaller, make it a little smaller. If it’s larger, make it a little larger.

In the same way, if you have a header make sure you’ve got enough room on the top margin to support it (you usually want at least a 1″ margin, so there’s at least half an inch of whitespace outside the half-inch header area). And if you’ve got a footer make sure you’ve got enough room for it in the bottom margin.

I also talked yesterday about “mirrored margins” — handling right and left margins differently on right-hand and left-hand pages. That’s a far more important thing to get right. Luckily, Word makes it pretty easy.

Once again, open the Page Setup controls, and then look for a checkbox labeled Different odd and even. (On the dialogue box, you’ll find it on the Layout tab.) Once you check that box, the margin fields will switch from saying “Left” and “Right” to “Inside” and “Outside.”

You’ll also see the “Gutter” field, which lets you add extra margin in that inside edge of the page trapped against the binding. A regular 1″ outside margin is usually enough if you’re planning to do a top-corner staple or hole-punch for a 3-ring binder, but if the edges of your pages are going to be bound together, I’ve often heard it recommended to add 1/8″ per 50 pages.

Making Your Document Smarter

Today’s article isn’t a terribly complicated one, but you can give credit for that to Microsoft. Page Setup is a crucial part of professional document formatting, and they made it pretty easy.

Next week I plan to finish up this series with a look at a little bit more complicated tool, but also one of the coolest (and handiest) features for polishing the professional appearance of your document. We’ll talk about adding smart text to your headers and footers, and keeping track of your references.

Definitely come back for that one. You’ll be glad you did.

Your tax dollars at work.

Paper Size

One of the first choices in a document’s page layout is the paper it’s going to be printed on. If you’re going to have to deal with printing and binding a document (and the associated costs), paper size becomes a critical concern. Standard sizes will usually print cheaper (although not always), but you’ll have to think through what size of pages will most effectively contain the information you need to present.

If you’re really involved (or really trying to manage costs), you’ll also have to think about what size sheets the pages will be printed on. In large print runs, there’s often four or more document pages per sheet of printer paper. These large sheets are then cut or folded to create document pages, and every additional cut or fold adds to your document’s manufacturing cost.

In all likelihood you won’t have to deal with any of that, but even if you’re just working on the $60 inkjet in your home office, you still have choices to make. Do you want to print your document on a standard sheet of Letter paper (8 1/2″ x 11″), or a taller Legal page (8 1/2″ x 14″). Most office printers will also come stocked with 11″ x 17″ sheets, which can be quite handy for foldout illustrations.

Another standard print size, common for trade paperbacks, is 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″, which you can get by folding a sheet of Letter in half or cutting along its center line. You can sometimes get a professional look for a short booklet by setting up your book as two columns of text on a landscape sheet of Letter, then folding it and stapling it along the middle.

Paper Orientation

Landscape pages are pages wider than they are tall. It’s a popular layout for printing posters and heavily-illustrated documents like children’s picture books. Landscape isn’t as effective for text-heavy pages, though. Generally, you should manage your text columns so readers don’t have to turn their heads at all while reading a row from left to right.

In our documents at work we’ll often use landscape 11″ x 17″ pages for engineering schematics, tucked between 8 1/2″ x 11″ portrait pages of body text. It takes a little bit of work to manage those transitions in Word but it creates a much more readable document than we’d get spilling all those text pages over sprawling 17″-wide pages or trying to cram detailed drawings into an 8 1/2″ space.

And of course we don’t get to use all 8 1/2″. In fact, we use the same 1″ margins you remember from school papers, so we’re left with a text column that’s only 6.5″ from left to right.

The Purpose of Margins

Have you ever stopped to think about page margins? As a technical writer, I certainly have. Margins steal significant amounts of print area from every page in your document, but they serve an important purpose. In fact, depending on your perspective, they serve several.

They’re popular places to scribble comments and notes, but margins exist for much more practical reasons: to protect the information contained in a document.

The page edges are the weak link in the book as a storage format for information. If a closed book gets wet, the water damage is worst along the outside edges. As a book gets old and tattered, it’s the edges of the page that crack and fall apart. Keeping wide margins allows us to respect the physical limitations of our media and still protect the information we’re trying to convey to readers.

And readers certainly benefit from margins, even if the document they’re reading isn’t a water-stained antique. Generous outside margins give readers a place to hold the document without blocking text with their hands. A wide top and inside margin lets a reader staple a loose-leaf document without losing the ability to read the top inside corner of every page.

I said “inside” and “outside” there instead of “left” and “right,” because they change when you’re printing pages front-and-back. If you think of a thick paperback book, there’s a lot of page next to the spine that can be tough to read. On a left-hand page that’s the right margin, and on a right-hand page it’s the left margin, but in either case it’s the inner margin. We call that unreadable edge next to the spine the “gutter.”

How to Use Section Breaks in Microsoft Word

That’s a lot of stuff to manage, but if you’re trying to produce a professionally-formatted document, you need to consider every aspect of your reader’s experience. The good news is, modern word processors provide tools to handle all of it, and to handle it well.

I’ll show you where to find the necessary options tomorrow, when we look yet again at how to use section breaks in Microsoft Word.

And actually…I complain sometimes about my day job, but I’ve always been a pretty technical sort, even when I’m caught up in my creative side. Technical Writing holds a real appeal to me whether or not I need it to pay the bills, and for precisely that reason it took me a little while to settle into using scribblebooks.

My first scribblebook was a gift to me in high school, and it came with the sincere dedication:

Aaron,

This book is for you to sketch down your thoughts and poems.

Love, Lindsay

It seemed far too small for the grand, world-changing ideas I was busy with in my writing, but I used it to capture notes to myself. The pagers were unlined, too, so it made a handy sketchbook, and I’d scratch out rough sketches of scenes from my book from time to time (usually while I was bored in some science or history class).

A couple years later I got to college and needed to take a lot more notes to keep up with everything I was doing. I dug out my old, almost-forgotten scribblebook and put it to use for class notes (and, once again, doodling when I was bored in Gen Eds).

That’s when I really started seeing the potential of it, too. I carried it with me everywhere, and it became my address book, my datebook, and it finally started to serve its initial purpose as I started capturing snippets of prose I wanted to put in a book someday.

On my mission trip, it became a security blanket, and I’d dive into its pages when I needed to escape all the people. I wrote poems about the cold loneliness of religion that made it into my college literary magazine, and notes to myself trying to capture the memories of these fascinating people I met for a moment, and wanted to remember for a lifetime. The last page has a tally of all the things I’d bought while in Britain, scribbled during the last half hour of my flight home so I could report it all to customs.

I got back from that trip absolutely dependent on my scribblebook, and devastated that it was full. Trish got me a new one right away, and after I filled that one, too, I ended up going back through both of them and filling up every half-inch of whitespace I could find with a rough outline for a non-fiction book on grilling that I never got around to writing.

Page Layout

I wouldn’t expect everyone to see the beauty I find in a well-abused scribblebook, but there’s a certain magic to the humble piece of paper. It’s amazing how many different purposes it can serve, how many forms of communication it offers — formal and informal, private and public.

This week I want to talk to you about pages — paper size, page orientation, and margins. It might seem like a trivially basic concern, but getting the foundation right will make the whole rest of your structure stronger. So come back tomorrow for a look at the various aspects of page layout in a professionally-formatted document.

Because that’s what we’re doing. Whether you’re trying to manage text columns, headers and footers, or any other page layout elements in Microsoft Word, you’ve got to understand and work with the program’s Sections and Section Breaks.

I’m not going to duplicate the content, though. This week I want to talk to you about how to use those sections to fill your headers and footers with the document context information I talked about in yesterday’s post, so if you skipped the first post on section breaks in Microsoft Word, go back and read it now. Once you’re up to speed, we’ll get right to work.

Modifying Header and Footer Text

Now, before you start messing with the sections, the first thing you need to know how to do is put anything in a header and footer. That depends a little bit on your software version, but it’s not too hard to find.

If you’ve already got a header or footer, you’ll see it as grayed-out text above or below the document’s page text, and even though you can’t select it or type over it, it’s really easy to get access to modify. Just double-click anywhere in the header or footer area (the easiest way to make sure you’re in the right place is to double-click the gray text, but that’s not strictly necessary), and now the page text will become grayed-out and uneditable, and the headers and footers are yours to control.

At that point, we’ll say you’re in Header and Footer Mode. Word basically toggles between the two — either you can edit the headers and footers, or you can edit the page text. You can never work on both at the same time.

If you don’t already have something in the header or footer, though, Word doesn’t bother tracking your mouseclicks in that area, so you’ll have to access it another way. In older versions of Word, you’d use the menu to go to View | Header and Footer, which toggles you into Header and Footer Mode and places your cursor in the header of the currently-selected page. In newer versions, you’ll find Header and Footer as an option on the Page Layout ribbon, and once you enter Header and Footer Mode Word will provide an extra ribbon just for that.

Managing Word’s Helpfulness

Once you’ve got information in your headers and footers, that’s when you need to start worrying about Word’s section breaks. If you’re trying to make a really professional-looking document, anyway, you’ll want to manage your headers and footers, and Word goes a long way to help you with that…and sometimes goes a little too far.

There are three key things you’ll eventually want to do:

• Different odd and even pages
• Different first page
• Different front matter

I’ll address them in reverse order, because the last one is the easiest to explain.

Different Front Matter

“Front matter,” in case I haven’t already explained it, refers to things like a Foreword, a Letter from the Author, an Introduction if you’ve got one, and (most commonly) a Table of Contents. The reason you want a different header and footer in the front matter is because of an old standard: Roman numeral page numbers.

So you’d want your Table of Contents to start on i and maybe run through to iv, but then Chapter 1 should show, in the footer, “Page 1″ (even though it’s actually like the seventh or ninth page in the document).

The way you handle that is with Sections. Insert a Section Break between the end of the front matter and just before the beginning of the body (put your cursor before the “C” in “Chapter One” and Insert | Breaks | Section Break – Next Page).

Now that you’ve got a break, switching into Header and Footer Mode will now show a little title in the box outlining the header and footer, labeling it as “Header (Section 2)” or something to that effect.

By default, Word will go ahead and duplicate your initial Header and Footer across all the sections. It uses a setting called Same as Previous which you’ll find highlighted in the Headers and Footers toolbar. As long as that’s on, anything you change in the Section 2 Header will also change in the Section 1 Header (and vice versa).

Once you turn it off, though (just click on it, and it’ll toggle off), you can change the Page Number settings in Section 1 to Style “i,  ii,  iii…” and Start With “i,” then change Section 2 to Style “1, 2, 3…” and Start With “1.”

That’s all it takes.

Different Front Page

You’ve got a couple more options, too. You can tell Word if you want a Different First Page header and footer (and that’s the first page of the section, not necessarily of the whole document).

This feature is often handy when you’re dealing with something other than a book, because the first page almost always contains all the information you would put in a header and footer (author, title, section, subject, and even the page number should be pretty apparent).

By far the most common way to use Different First Page is to turn it on, and then just delete everything in the First Page Header and First Page Footer.

Different Odd and Even Pages

You can also turn on Different Odd and Even, which lets you format the fronts of pages in a bound document (right-hand pages, or odd pages) differently from the backs of pages (left-hand, or even). They’re usually done as mirror images of each other, so instead of the page number being right justified in the footer, it’s right-justified on the odd pages and left-justified on even pages, meaning it’s always on the outside edge of the page.

That only matters when you’re printing front-and-back, but it can add a really professional look to documents produced that way.

And if you read the article when it went live yesterday…swing back by today. I finally added an illustration to it, and it’s just about the most adorable illustration you’ve ever seen.

Establishing Document Information

I’m not supposed to be talking about Annabelle today, though. I’m supposed to be talking about document design, carrying on a series I started a few weeks ago on finishing a fully-formatted document.

That’s a bit of a broad topic, because “document” covers too much ground, and so does the toolset available under the heading “fully-formatted.” There are a handful of style elements that are critical to creating a professional-looking document, though, and their elements are pretty consistent no matter what document type you’re working with.

One of the most important of those is the statement of your document type itself. A good template not only tells an author where to put critical information, it also tells a reader at a glance exactly what they’re looking at. In the same way, the header and footer elements of your page setup can inform (or remind) a reader exactly what they’re looking at any time they glance at any given page of the document.

Remember that, the next time you’re reading a professionally-formatted document — whether it’s a textbook or a memo from middle management. Look over the header and footer and see just what information is there. Chances are good you’ll find a page number, giving you constant context for the information you’re evaluating. You’ll also probably find the document’s title repeated, and may find something more detailed, whether it’s the document’s form number, its preparation date, maybe a chapter heading, or even just key words for the current section.

Whatever elements are included, they serve as an anchor on every single page of the document, reminding you what it is you’re reading, and where you currently are within that information.

Establishing Author Information

One of the most valuable of those elements (although, admittedly, I might be biased here), is author information. That’s where yesterday’s story fits in, because there are certain things that take on different meaning coming from, say, a dragon, than they would from a toddler — and even that would come across differently than it would from an infant.

As readers we constantly evaluate the information we’re reading based on who it is providing that information to us. And I’m going to tell you the same thing I’ve been telling my creative writers for the last three weeks: it’s your job to tell your readers everything they need to know before they need to know it.

That’s why your title page comes at the front of the document, and it’s why the name of the author is one of the most common elements to stick in a header. The very first line of every single page in the document tells the reader exactly who it is that’s telling them this.

Managing Section Breaks in Microsoft Word

So…you’ve seen headers and footers, you’ve got a basic idea what they’re for and how you should use them…but how do you use them? The short answer: it depends. On your writing software, among other things.

I’ve promised to walk you through document setup in Microsoft Word for this whole series, so that’s what I’ll show you. If you want to skip ahead, I’ll tell you that Headers and Footers are a Page Layout element that you’ll want to View — the caps in that sentence should be enough to cover your software version, one way or another, for at least the last decade. If you’re using something older than that, you’re on your own.

If you don’t feel like sleuthing it out, just come back tomorrow. I’ll provide screenshots, and walk you through setting up headers and footers in Microsoft Word.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but one of my proudest moments as a father so far was when, barely a year old, Annabelle first started playing dragon. I started growling at her when she was teeny tiny — it was adorable, seeing her startle, and then clap and laugh. As she got closer and closer to her birthday, though, she started growling right back, chasing me around the living room and down the hall….

And…well, it’s not just that she was playing dragon, but that she was playing dragon nine months before she ever started playing princess. “That,” I’d tell visitors, as they watched her stomp around and swipe at them with her terrible claws, “that’s my girl!”

When she got old enough for words, I taught her how to use that pretense. If she told me she was scared of something, I’d act a little thoughtful, and then ask, “Well…would a dragon be scared of those shadows?”

And she’d laugh and say, “No, silly!”

And I’d say, “Well, why don’t you just be a dragon? One good growl at those shadows, and they won’t dare mess with you!”

I didn’t mind too much when she finally did start playing princess, though. That went hand-in-hand with playing dress-up, and she was just so terribly lovely, clopping down the hall in kid-sized attire that still looked monstrously oversized on her tiny frame, preening as perfectly as any pureblood princess ever did.

I love the way she sees every story as an interactive opportunity, new material for her pretend time, no matter how much she likes the actual show. And she sees that sort of opportunity everywhere she goes, in everything she does.

I never know, from one day to the next, what I’m going to come home to. Sometimes it’s, “Hi, Daddy! I’m glad you’re home! I’m a puppy!” Sometimes, “Hi, Daddy! I’m glad you’re home! I’m a medical doctor!” And, no matter what else, she’s also always a superhero.

It’s absolutely precious…most of the time. The last year it’s taken on a new aspect, though. See…she’s paid especially shrew attention to the new interloper in her home — Baby Alexander — and she picked up with an astonishing rapidity that he got away with things she doesn’t get away with.

And, ever since, she’s added a new persona to her repertoire. “I’m a baby!” She throws a toy, or grabs something away from her brother or cousin, and then when we go to scold her, she looks up with a big smile and says, “I don’t understand. I’m just a baby.”

She remembered lessons I’d taught her a year earlier, and figured out how to use pretending to her advantage. All of a sudden, it wasn’t so cute.

One night she was sitting in her chair at the table when Trish brought her a plate of dinner and she grunted, “Nuh uh! I don’t want this.”

I looked her in the eye, and said, “That’s what we’re having.”

“It’s not what brother’s having.”

“Brother’s a baby,” I said, knowing immediately what her answer would be.

“I’m a baby!”

I thought for a moment, and then said, “Are you sure?” She nodded, and I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “Well, you may not know this, but babies don’t get to do a lot of the things big girls get to do. They don’t get to watch TV.”

Her face fell. I went on gravely, “And they don’t get to play with crayons or paint or bubbles. They don’t get to play on all your big girl toys outside. And they don’t get to go swimming, or eat ice cream, or read at bedtime–”

And I watched her eyes get wider and wider through it all, thinking to myself, I am such a genius. As I rambled on, she finally waved both hands frantically to get me to stop, shaking her head.

I cut myself short, and she took a deep breath, and then said, “Silly Daddy. I’m not that kind of baby. I’m a big girl baby.”

I smiled patronizingly (appropriately enough). “There’s no such thing as big girl babies.”

“Of course there is!” she said seriously. “Me!” And she beamed, thrilled in her total victory. “Now get me some cereal.”

I hope to remedy that today. I’m going to walk you through the basics of setting up columns in Microsoft Word.

Setting Up a Columned Layout

The easiest way to set up columns in a document is to do it from the very start. Open a new document in Word, or load an existing document (assuming it doesn’t have any section breaks, which we’ll discuss later), then go to Format | Columns to open the Columns dialog.

Choose a two-column layout, and start typing (or, if you opened an existing document, just watch what happens). The whole document is now two-columns, and you can see in the following image how the extra whitespace breaks up the text density on the page.

Switching to (and from) a Columned Layout

Now, somewhere in that process, you should have seen a dropdown marked “Apply to Whole Document” (or, if you’re working in an existing document, it might have said, “This Section Only”). It’s easy enough to create columns in Word, but managing them can be a nightmare until you understand a few other elements of the software.

The first is “sections.” In Word, a “section” is a block of text with its own page formatting. Every document has at least one section (and, by default, only one), and with it a page layout (which includes the paper size and orientation, the margins, the header and footer text, and of course the column layout).

If you want to switch from a TOC with roman numerals for page numbers (in the footer) to a body section with Arabic numbers, you’ll need a section break between the two. If you want to switch from mostly vertical pages to a couple horizontal pages with illustrations on them in the middle of the book, you’ll need a section break before and after the change.

And if you want to switch from single-column body text to a multi-column offset section, you’ll need section breaks. Word handles breaks by inserting non-printing characters into the text flow, and there’s an option to display these non-printing characters. It clutters up your screen a little, but it’s incredibly helpful when you’re trying to figure out why a document isn’t cooperating with you.

To display non-printing characters, look on your toolbars for a paragraph symbol. (It might be hiding in a drop-down at the end of one of the toolbars.) Turn it on, and you should see (at the very least) all the paragraph marks on your page indicating where your paragraphs end. Depending how complicated your document layout is, you might see a whole mess of extra information on your page.

Now, move your cursor to the end of a paragraph partway through the document, and insert a new section break. From the menu choose Insert | Break… and you’ll get to see all the different types of break available. For our purposes, we want Continuous. Ignore the rest for now.

Skip down a point further down in the document (at least a few paragraphs down), and then insert another Continuous Section Break. Now your document has three sections: one before the first break, a second after it, and a third after the next break.

Click your mouse anywhere within the second section (between the two breaks), and go back to the Columns dialog. This time, instead of applying your change to the whole document, choose “Apply to This Section Only” before you hit Next.

For the illustration above, I turned the non-printing characters back off, so you could more easily see the visual effect we created. Some writers like to leave them off all the time, but I toggle back and forth all the time — sometimes you need to see what your readers will see, but other times it’s important to manage all the quirky effects Word is playing with.

Columnating a Selection

Of course, there are times when you have no desire to manage Word’s quirks at all. If you’re trying to create a quick effect, or if you don’t anticipate having to maintain the document later, there’s a much easier way to force a separately-columned section without inserting breaks or even understanding them.

All you’ve got to do is select the bit of text you want to modify:

And then, with it selected, go through the steps I defined above. Now, instead of choosing to apply the new layout to the whole document or to the current section, choose Apply to Selected Text.

Easy as that. Maybe I should have led with that method…but you know, eventually, you’re going to run into problems. And the only way you’ll ever be able to fix them is if you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

Today I want to talk about a different type of columns, though: text columns, and page layout and design in general. In fact, I’m going to spend the whole next month talking about professional document styling, so brace yourself!

Using Columns to Create Whitespace

You’re certainly familiar with text columnation — breaking up a single page of text into multiple narrow columns. There are several reasons we do that. The most common is to create an appealing visual effect.

I’ve spoken before about the use of whitespace in page layouts. It breaks up a big grey block of text into readable chunks. That’s why we use space between paragraphs, it’s why we look for every opportunity to incorporate headings and bulleted lists, and it’s absolutely the motivation behind most text columnation.

Think about the types of text you’re used to seeing in columns. Probably the three that spring most readily to mind are newspapers, indexes (like phone books, for example), and long-form heavy-reading (like textbooks or the Bible).

In all of those cases, you’re looking at documents that have to present huge blocks of text with few formatting options for breaking up the text. Switching to a columned layout automatically breaks up every page of the text, without requiring any manual adjustments within the content.

Using Columns to Differentiate Information

Another major reason we use column layouts is to differentiate text. Technically that’s something we use whitespace for, so this could be seen as a coincidental overlap with my last point, but the big difference here is that we’re not talking about whitespace just to break up the page, but to create a specific contrast.

In other words, unlike the multi-column documents I was talking about before, sometimes we’ll be working with a single-column document and just break a single section of the text into multiple columns. That creates a strong visual effect — as we discussed before — but in this case that effect serves primarily as a contrast to the other text around it.

I’ve seen this technique used in newsletters, brochures, textbooks, and other technical documents to draw attention to a particularly important bit of information within an otherwise dry description. One of the most common places you’ll see it, though, is in cookbooks.

That examples springs readily to mind, because I had to help one of my students figure it out for her final project in my Tech Writing class last fall. I won’t pretend I’m an expert on cookbooks, but I’ve seen this effect often enough that I feel pretty confident discussing it.

What you’ll usually see is a name for the dish, maybe an illustration, and then a two-column list of ingredients, before returning to standard full-block text for the preparation instructions. That layout strongly differentiates the ingredient list from the actual procedure.

Using Columns in Microsoft Word

There are certainly good reasons to use columned layouts in your writing. Sometimes you just want to add a professional touch to your document, or you’re trying to fit some text to an awkwardly shaped areas on a printed page. Every application has its own challenges, though — and only the most basic is anything like “easy” to do in a word processor.

My student learned that the hard way when she tried to prepare her cookbook, and I learn it the hard way again every time I try to do something that should be simple. Formatting columns can be punishingly difficult, but it’s also something you’ll need to do eventually.

So come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you how to set up column layouts in Microsoft Word. Even if you’re not using Word, chances are good this will get you moving in the right direction.

I don’t know if it’s readily apparent in that image, but we were building a fort in that photo. I think it was a snow day, but for whatever reason I was home with the family, and when Trish’s back was turned AB and I decided to turn the living room into a playground.

We used a couple chairs and a broomstick, a queen-size sheet and a couple heavy textbooks to hold the sheet out right. Trish caught us hiding in our creation, and snapped the image.

Annabelle’s had access to several fun forts like that. She’s got a big plastic play house out in the back yard — the kind you might remember from your last visit to a daycare playground, although the slide is missing — and when she goes to visit her cousins at Shannon’s place, she gets to play in an honest-to-goodness castle.

I didn’t have access to pre-fab structures like that when I was a kid — not at school, and certainly not at home. I made do, though. With fifteen acres of mostly-wooded land to play with, and a surprising amount of time completely on my own out there, I found my opportunities.

There was a huge boulder, probably a hundred feet long, thirty or forty feet across, and at least eight feet tall at the highest spot. My uncle Randy and I discovered it while out walking the trails on our property one time, and he said it would make an excellent outlaw den.

So we dug out a tunnel underneath it, from one end to the other, and built a cool fire pit right at the mouth of it. I’d spend hours climbing on the rock, crawling underneath it, or resting in its shadow and dreaming up outlaw stories.

Another time, way over on the other side of the property, Josh and I tried to build ourselves a clubhouse using the copious lumber readily available. We lacked such critical tools as foresight, planning, any degree of architectural competency, or…well, tools. So that got about as far as a leaky lean-to before we gave up.

I was committed to finding the perfect fort, though, and at long last I figured it out.

See…on the very back corner of our land grew this huge blackberry bush. Actually…it was probably really close to the same dimensions as the Big Rock I mentioned above. Every year in July we’d go out and pick bushels and bushels of blackberries, and the rest of the time we pretty much avoided that part of the property altogether.

One year while picking, though, I realized that the berries only grew on the very outside of the bush — that the bush sprawled over several hundred square feet, but we only made use of a tiny portion of it. Curious, I looked closer, and realized that only the very outside of the bush was even alive. Beneath a vibrant veneers a few feet thick was a dense, sprawling framework of long-dead branches.

And then I thought about digging that tunnel under the big rock, and realized how much simpler it would be to “dig” a path through the thin, brittle branches of the blackberry bush than it had been to dig through the hard clay under the rock.

It wasn’t quite as simple as I’d hoped, for a couple reasons. Mainly it was the thorns. Blackberry bushes aren’t quite as brutal as rosebushes, but they’re not far off, either. Carving a tunnel into a fluid mass of vicious thorns can be a dangerous procedure, and every branch I cut free had to be pulled out by hand. And, worse yet, every bit I missed got lost in the dust and leaves that littered the shadowy floor of my new cavern, so when I went crawling in on hands and knees, I came out all scraped up.

That didn’t bother me a bit, though. I was making a fort, after all, right? Every scratch reminded me what a great defensive structure this place was. Those thorns were my portcullis, my vats of boiling oil.

Eventually I wove together a mass of the cuttings, about the size and shape of a small shield, that I could wedge over the entrance to my tunnel as a makeshift door. It did wonders to hide what I was up to, too.

Oh, and I had to hide it. I mentioned my idea to Dad one time, looking for advice, and he strictly forbade me to start cutting on the blackberry bush. We all loved the annual yield of blackberries — the incredible cobblers, the jellies and jams, the syrup — Mom worked wonders with those berries, and Dad didn’t want me risking any of that.

I took that to heart, too. It didn’t stop me cutting — not at all — but it made me very careful wherever I went inside the belly of the bush. I watched for living vine, I carved my path through the thinnest branches and twisted and turned to avoid any trunks that looked thick enough to support significant weight from the top. I got caught in cave-ins a time or two — minor ones — and before long I understood the structure of the sprawling blackberry bush.

And from there I went wild. I spent most of a year on that project, and by the end I had three hidden entrances on our property and one escape route that opened right underneath the barbed-wire fence on our neighbor’s property. I had tunnels connecting all these entrances to a central chamber I could nearly stand up in, and two or three smaller side-chambers…and all of them supported by totally organic columns — untouched pillars where I’d avoided damaging the load-bearing trunks of long-dead bushes within the pile.

I’d sit alone, in my columned hall, and imagine myself a king in his throne room. It was glorious and, dangerous and bloody as it was, in its way it was far better than the pretty plastic toys Annabelle gets to play with. She’s got an imagination as big as mine, though, and in the end…that’s the bit that really matters.