Tag Archives: Writing

Draft 4 Revisited

Posted on 2022-01-01 by jcs

It’s New Years day and a lot of you are probably in no mind for an over stimulating rant on one of Irreal’s hobby horses or perhaps even a technical discussion so, instead, I offer a reprise of one of … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: The Oxford Comma

Posted on 2021-12-24 by jcs

There’s a particularly odious type of reprobate who refuses to use the Oxford comma. A subset of the type can claim ignorance as a mitigating factor but, sadly, the majority of the transgressors do so with full knowledge and understanding … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Spaces After a Sentence

Posted on 2021-10-08 by jcs

Today’s Red Meat Friday is about the “correct” number of spaces after a sentence. Irreal has written about this before, most recently here, but all of you were familiar with the controversy long before Irreal opined on the matter. Oddly, … Continue reading →

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Book Publishing with LaTeX and Pandoc

Posted on 2021-03-17 by jcs

Dan Grec was a software engineer who gave it all up for adventures of a different kind. Now he drives his Jeep all around the world living the life he’d always dreamed of. He’s also published a couple of books … Continue reading →

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The Webster 1913 Dictionary

Posted on 2020-10-04 by jcs

If you’ve been around for a while, you may remember my Draft #4 post from 5 years ago. That post explained why you’re probably using the wrong dictionary and why the correct dictionary is the Webster 1913 + 1828. The … Continue reading →

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Microsoft Stirs the Pot on Spaces After a Period

Posted on 2020-04-28 by jcs

Recently, Microsoft reignited the long standing debate on the proper number of spaces after a period by having Word flag two spaces as an error and offering to fix it. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball is not impressed. He … Continue reading →

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A Workflow For Writing A Book

Posted on 2020-04-18 by jcs

Vladimir Keleshev has an interesting post that details his book writing process. It is, in a sense, low tech in that it uses very basic tools: Pandoc, Make, and Vim. He writes in Markdown and uses Pandoc to covert that … Continue reading →

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Making Money in Self Publishing

Posted on 2020-04-14 by jcs

Those of you who have been with Irreal for the long term know that I’ve always been highly skeptical of the publishing industry’s claim that almost the whole cost of publishing a book is editing and marketing and that things … Continue reading →

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Proof Reading with Text-To-Speech

Posted on 2018-11-13 by jcs

Via Wilfred Hughes here’s a really neat trick for those of you who write things other than code: Life hack I don’t share often enough: using text-to-speech to proofread your writing. Your eye will gloss over all sorts of mistakes … Continue reading →

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The Em-Dash

Posted on 2018-01-07 by jcs

Those of you who have been around for a while and who pay attention to such things have probably noticed that I’m partial to—probably overly partial to1—the use of em-dashes. I no longer remember for sure how it started but … Continue reading →

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