Amy Abatangle

This is the first in a series of posts/rants about written & visual communication, and the intersection of the two. I’ve been thinking more about what it takes to produce successful writing, particularly when it will be read as a digital communication, and have come up with a few ideas.

The Mac is Not a Typewriter and Other Niceties

My husband shared this wonderful idea, book and author (Robin Williams) with me in the early ’90s, and it has changed my life. Perhaps the notion that a computer is not a typewriter is obvious to the graphic designers amongst us, but just about everyone now is a graphic designer of one sort or another. I mean this literally. If you think of everyone in their prosumer roles, almost all of us are producers of both writing and design at home and at work. Our products may be simple emails or homemade greeting cards, but almost all of us produce enough documents to have made the term “desktop publishing” all but obsolete.

It’s time for us to realize, then, that we can safely throw away the mannerisms of the typewriter. I’m not sure if these habits are limited only to those of us who didn’t grow up “texting” our friends, but they bear repeating.

Robin Williams gives you twenty or so rules. I give you five.

Five Rules to Live By

1. You don’t need to hit the space key twice after the end of a sentence. Really.
2. You have the em and en dashes available to you in both HTML and Microsoft Word. Use them.
3. Figure out accent marks and key caps. If Mötley Crüe can, so can you.
4. You can break up your paragraphs using a double hard return rather than an indent.
5. Think about capitalization. The only people allowed to use caps for emphasis are your grandma and Germans.