Tag Archives: Writing

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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Draft #4, The Book

Posted on 2017-09-03 by jcs

Those of you who read and enjoyed my post on Draft #4, about John McPhee and why you’re probably using the wrong dictionary, will be happy to know that McPhee has a new book, Draft No. 4, that discusses his … Continue reading →

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The Right Dictionary

Posted on 2017-01-22 by jcs

A couple of years ago, I wrote about James Somers’ beautiful post on why you are probably using the wrong dictionary. The right dictionary, it turns out, is the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. You can read my … Continue reading →

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Writing

Posted on 2015-09-10 by jcs

This seems familiar The best part about sitting down to write is cleaning my entire apartment. — Caira Conner (@CairaConner) November 18, 2014

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Draft #4

Posted on 2015-07-07 by jcs

I’ve had this post in my blog-ideas queue for some time but it’s always seemed too far afield from Irreal’s interests—being about writing and dictionaries, and stuff—to write about. Now, happily, I’ve found the perfect hook. I wrote previously about … Continue reading →

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