June 20, 2016
Accidents of Style on the Way to Better Writing
Accidents of Style
Product: The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly - Kindle edition by Charles Harrington Elster
Price: $7.99
Product: The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly: Charles Harrington Elster
Price: $14.03
I don't remember being taught much grammar. Catholic school in India might have taught me the rules of grammar, but for some odd reason, I don't remember any of it. I have been writing. All my life. The dominant rule was, "Does it sound right?" As long as it did, I was happy with it. No one complained. The grammar police didn't break down my door, I was happy.
I started writing this blog in its various incarnations about eight years ago, and wanted for the first time in my life to make an effort to write better. I had no idea how to go about that. What is better? How do you achieve it?
I decided to do four things:
- Write more. I figured it was a skill. Practice would make me better.
- Edit. This is a skill which I am learning. Can a sentence be shorter? Am I using too many adverbs? Can I make this engaging? Is it passive? I must admit that this is a work in progress. I am nowhere near "good" at this point.
- Read more. I have always read voraciously but I have broadened the subjects that I read now. I am reading books on writing. Reading books on grammar. Trying to learn a few new skills is how I see it.
- Read critically. I am not only reading the subject but also reading the writing. I am paying attention to how authors write.
In the course of this journey I am coming across a few gems I will share over a few blog posts. Today's candidate is an interesting book. It is written by Charles Harrington Elster and is called, "The Accidents of Style: Good advice on How Not to Write Badly."
Remember I said that the rule I used to use was, "Does it sound right?" This implies that my ears can tell the difference between what is right and not so right. It means that even though I cannot explain why something sounds wrong, I know it when I hear it. Horsepucky. Doesn't work that way at all. I am going to give you an example of an excerpt from this book to demonstrate how wrong I was.
Accident 1
Every day or everyday?
The confusion between every day and everyday occurs multiple times every day; it’s an everyday accident. Even The New York Times Magazine is not immune to it: “As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that’s what I wanted to wear everyday.” Make that every day.
What’s the difference? Every day is a standalone phrase that can fit almost anywhere in a sentence, while everyday is an adjective meaning “daily” or “ordinary” that always modifies a noun, as in everyday life, everyday clothes, and everyday problems.
The trick to getting it right lies in determining whether the phrase can stand by itself (“I think of you every day”) or whether it is tied to a following noun. If something can be used every day, it is suitable for everyday use. Some chores must be done every day, which makes them everyday chores. What’s the first line of the song “Everyday Blues”? It’s “Every day I have the blues,” of course.
Before reading this book, I had no idea what the difference was between "everyday" and "every day." I have, I am certain, used them interchangeably. And I was wrong, some of the time. I didn't know the difference, that meant that my ears didn't have the ability to pick up on what was wrong. I didn't know that "everyday" was an adjective that always modifies a noun. My ears, as arbiters of what is correct and what is wrong, fell woefully short. The book covers 350 accidents like this one. Some of them I knew. Most of them were eye-opening, aha-moments for me.
If you are serious about wanting to write better, you might want to read this book. It has taught me so much that I intend to read it a few more times.
Recommended heartily.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Writing
June 15, 2016
Set up Night Shift in iOS
One of the nice features of iOS 9 is the introduction of Night Shift. You turn on Night Shift to protect your Circadian rhythm, and to make it easier to fall asleep. Night Shift gradually reduces the amount of blue light emanating from your device as it gets more dark outside, and makes the settings normal in the morning. It protects your eyes and prevents your iPhone or iPad from telling your eyes that it is daytime.
Enable Night Shift
NightShift
Go to Settings and tap on Display and Brightness.
NightShift Enable
Tap on Night Shift.
NightShiftSchedule
Tap on the toggle next to Scheduled. Turn it on. Choose the schedule, I have Sunset to Sunrise as the period when Night Shift is enabled.
NightShiftControlCenter
You can achieve the same thing through the Control Center. By swiping up, from the bottom of your iPhone or iPad screen, you can bring up Control Center. Tap on the icon in the middle to turn Night Shift on. If you have it scheduled, the icon shows the state it is in, the daylight icon is different from the Night Shift enabled icon.
Night Shift is a great feature on the iOS devices. You can get the same thing for your macOS devices if you install an application called f.lux.
Both Night Shift and f.lux are highly recommended.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
iOS
June 13, 2016
Writed Pro falls short of the competition
Writed Pro
Product: Writed Pro
Price: $8.99
Writed Pro is one of a new class of applications which are appearing in the Mac App Store. It is at its base, a distraction free text editor, supporting Markdown. It lets you export to Markdown, Word (doc and docx files), OpenOffice (odt files) and Rich Text files (rtf files).
With the subscription model under which Word is now available from Microsoft, there seems to be a need for apps which have the ability to deal with Word files without actually using Word. Writed Pro is an attempt at doing that.
You can open any Word document. It gets converted to Markdown syntax. You can work on it, and export to a Word document.
I have no need for this feature. I am and have been Microsoft free for a decade. But I can see why this has become a feature which is highlighted by these applications. Being able to read and generate Microsoft Word files is an important skill to have in the business world.
I have no idea how well Writed Pro does in converting the word files to markdown. I threw a few Word files at it, but they were not rich in formatting, it seemed to handle those fine. I don't know what it would do with a complicated, densely styled Word document. Pages can read and export to Word files too. I prefer Writed Pro only because it converts Word files to Markdown and that is the format I live and write in.
It is a competent Markdown based text editor. Supports most of the usual Markdown features. Footnotes are not supported and tables support needs work. There is a rudimentary support of keyboard commands built into the program. For instance, ⌘+B for bold, ⌘+I for italic and ⌘+K for strikethrough. However there are no keyboard commands for some other things you do regularly in Markdown, for instance links, ordered and unordered lists. It doesn't support system level keyboard commands for some commonly used features like full screen mode. The default command is ⌃+⌘+F, but Writed Pro doesn't support it. You have to invoke the command through the Window menu.
The full screen is well implemented. The focus mode lacks typewriter scrolling, and true focus on paragraph or sentence as implemented by Byword andiA Writer. Both of these applications let you open Microsoft Word files, and export documents to the Microsoft word format. iA Writer like Writed pro also converts Word files to Markdown. Writed Pro is playing in a crowded field with some well established competitors.
The Competition Eats Writed Pro's Lunch
In every meaningful criteria, Writed Pro seems to be the poor cousin of iA Writer. That might be understandable, Writed Pro is at version 1.0. iA Writer has had a few iterations and is now at version 3.0. These are the things Writed Pro does better:
- Writed Pro has themes. iA Writer only has light and dark mode.
- Writed Pro supports a few different fonts which are tied to its themes. iA Writer only supports its customized implementation of Nitti.
iA Writer is a complete markdown based writing solution, Writed Pro has a ways to go. You can read about iA Writer here.
Recommendation
If you are interested in this product category. Get iA Writer. Writed Pro only makes sense if you are severely resource constrained. iA Writer costs $14.99 while Writed Pro costs $8.99, but is often on sale for $0.99.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Markdown
Writed Pro
June 8, 2016
Don't Break the Chain or Your Streak
Product: Chains - Packages - Package Control.
Price: Free
Product: Streaks
Price: $3.99
Jerry Seinfeld is the originator of this productivity hack.
To become a better comedian, he wrote daily. To motivate himself, he put a large calendar that had a whole year on one page on the wall. Got himself a thick red magic marker and everyday he wrote, he would put a big red X over that day. Soon he had a chain going. The only task left?
"Don't break the chain."
I got reminded of this by an article in Medium, where Broderick Turner talked about writing daily.
I use a plugin for Sublime Text 3 called Chains. It is a calendar for the whole year. You get to mark off the days that you have completed the task that you have set for yourself. Do this for a few days and soon you see the chain emerge. I am using this to help me write every day. The chain is 22 days old.
Streaks
If you don't use Sublime Text 3, you can get the same help from an iOS app called Streaks. It is well-designed, and lets you track up to six tasks. It has links to the Health app, so, it is more versatile than a Sublime Text 3 plugin.
Both products and the productivity hack are recommended heartily.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Writing
June 6, 2016
Syntra Small: A Fast and Free Text Editor
Syntra Small
Product: Syntra Small | Code Editor Built for Speed
Price: Free
This is a new text editor for the Mac OS. It is available from the Mac App Store, here.
The developer is clear as to its mission. This is it:
My goal with Syntra Small is to make the fastest, tiniest, most modular code editor on OS X.
It's not meant to replace your IDE. It's meant to be there for those times when you need to quickly browse or edit a script, and want to do so with beautiful syntax highlighting and a built in linter.
So, how does it do?
It is fast. Fast to launch. Almost instant, on my five year old iMac. It is snappy.
Tiniest? I am not sure I care about that. But as a programmer, the developer might. I don't see the advantage that this provides the user. But to indulge the developer:
| Syntra Small |
18 megs |
| CotEditor |
19.4 megs |
| SublimeText |
31.4 megs |
| BBEdit |
30.7 megs |
| TextMate |
33 megs |
It is capable. It is fast. It is beautiful.
Syntra Preferences
It is minimal in that it gives you a small subset of decisions in its preference panel. You get to choose between Light or Dark mode. You get to specify Soft Tabs settings, Enable or disable Auto-Save and choose a font from a selection made available by the developer.
It has github integration available through the modular plug-ins which are a part of the architecture. I am waiting for more choices in that feature. A public API which is promised will make the process of users adding plugins easier.
That is about it.
One of the advantages of dealing with a new product is that as an user you get to have some impact on the design and future of the product. The developer, Garet McKinley is responsive and you the user, have an opportunity to affect the future design and growth of the product.
Markdown
Syntra Small supports the basic features of every text editor, It supports themes and highlights the syntax of a whole host of languages. For my needs, it does a good job of highlighting markdown syntax.
What Is It About Full Screen Mode That Baffles All of These Editors?
I have noticed that a lot of these text editors have trouble implementing full screen mode on the iMac. Why is it difficult to implement a 80-character or thereabouts, text window. The text window centered on the screen and everything else black or swathed in the background color? For instance, this is Syntra Small in fullscreen mode.
Syntra Full Screen
I know the screenshot is difficult to read. Look at the lines, they go across the screen. So one line is all across the 27 inch iMac screen. It is not possible for anyone to write like that.
See the same thing in Sublime Text 3.
Sublime Text 3 full screen
See the same thing in BBEdit.
BBEdit Full Screen
I wish the developers would solve this problem and make full screen usable on bigger displays.
This is a free offering. It does what it is supposed to do and if you are looking for a quick, easy to use text editor, it fits the bill nicely.
Recommended heartily.
macosxguru at the gmail thingie
Syntra Small
text editor
Bicycle For Your Mind