Category Archives: Ria Loader

Writing process: Top 10 ways of finding grammar errors

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Grammar errors are one of the most pesky things to eradicate in the writing process. Scrivener doesn’t find grammar mistakes, and while MS Word is pretty good at finding normal passive errors, it fails to recognize idiom. Language is changing. Sentences can and often do start with ‘and, but, or, though’ in colloquial use.

If you’re like me, when you write the first draft you don’t pay any attention to the rules. Well, truth to tell, rules are hardly ever my best thing. I tend to think in fragments; that means some of my characters share this trait. Enough said.

Even in a blog, the sentence construction is not a slave to the Oxford English way of writing. Be a bit boring if it was. However, the unintentional grammar error is the bane of a writer’s existence. It’s just fine to break rules on purpose, so long as you know your purpose. Richard Morgan stood the grammar rules on their collective head in Altered Carbon. His more stream-of-consciousness writing included sentence fragments much of the time. None of that made it difficult to read. Instead, it made his protagonist much more sympathetic. So how do I find those errors in the editing process? I have a few tips and tricks to share.

  1. Walk away from the writing for a couple of days to give yourself some distance
  2. Print it out and keep a highlighting pen handy to mark the pieces to come back to
  3. Read it out loud to a friend. The tongue will trip over phrases that aren’t quite right
  4. Do an editing pass with track-changes on
  5. Try turning it upside down – for those of us who can read that way, the comma and grammar errors jump out
  6. Do an editing pass just for dialog.
  7. Use Find / Replace to fix issues like quote plus period (“. wrong) rather than period plus quote (.” correct)
  8. Write with a manual of style handy – look up stuff that you know you get wrong
  9. Replace instances of passive voice (often uses words that end in y) with active voice (often ends in ‘ed’)
  10. Relax about it. No matter how many times you edit, someone will disagree with your choices

I hope some of these prove helpful. Please share the tips and tricks you have found work for you.

Meditation and the month of May

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Hawthorn, Washington

Hawthorn – the May

Here, as the May, or Hawthorn, has finished blooming it is one of the times in the year that I pause and think about where I am and who I am becoming.  While some think of May 1 as May Day, I prefer to wait until the Hawthorn acts as a signal to re-establish my center in relationship to the world around me. There is also a little meditation about approaching my birthday later in the year; May is the halfway mark to my birthday in November.

The passing of the May seems to coincide with spring cleaning, gardening, and all the renewal projects. It also signals that the time for outdoor fun is here, at least if the weather cooperates. Here’s hoping for a bright and renewing summer for my friends and family.

[Part of this article has been sent to another post, if you saw the original version that talked about Cycles of 7 years.]

Ria

Design for the right size screen

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The monitors are larger,

so we can fit more on the screen

vectorstock_18712444One of the challenges of design is to have a response to the desire to fit more on the screen, as it seems obvious (to some) that a larger screen means more real estate to fill. Periodically, we also hear a proposal to have wider text, beyond the 75 characters that a person can read without turning their head. And that really depends on whether the device is at 10 feet, like a television or hand-held, like a smart phone.

However, the proportional relationship described by the distance between eyes, the reach of the arm, the amount a person can view without turning their head – those hold true, regardless of the size of the screen, console, device. For most practical purposes, designers use the width of 45-75 characters as the optimal width for reading. That’s actually why we have columns in magazines and newspapers. It makes it easier to read. We can cheat those numbers a bit, but beyond around 80 characters, we need to understand how we’re hurting readers.

As designers of human-computer interactions and experiences, we find ourselves drawing pictures to show people how that works. We draw the distance between human eyes, the viewing distance of the screen, at arm’s length away from the person, and the cone that represents the field of vision. We show a novel held in the hand, and examples from movies such as star wars, where there are a few large words across the screen, but those words fill the whole visual field

A long time ago

In a galaxy

Far far away

We show a person holding up their thumb, and moving it around at arm’s length. This simulates how we parse information, the thumb being the point of attention, and moving the thumb shows the bite-sized chunk of information we see at a time. The size of the monitors has changed, but the focus of human eyes has not. Human-machine interface follows the same rules as the other proportional relationships found in nature, and in the human body.

Fibonacci  described the relationships as part of the sequence of numbers and geometry found in the body, and in nature, as part of a spiral known as the divine proportion, or golden ratio. Though we more popularly know of Fibonacci from the Dan Brown novel, The DaVinci Code, his explorations of numbers in nature and the body are fascinating from a design perspective. They remind us that defining space, and designing within that space, can be made more pleasing by paying attention to the golden ratio. We can choose rectangular shapes that follow that ratio; we can also place information in places that the eye will naturally follow, along the curve of the spiral.

Changes in perception are occuring, however, not in ways we may have expected. More often than not, those large screens allow us to switch rapidly between different screens, rather than expanding just one. We can fit more windows on the screen, and move our attention between those windows, and the information contained in them. We also move perceptually between multiple email conversations, surfing, games, and writing, all in parallel. However, unless working on a full-game immersion, or a graphics program, maximizing a window is out. It makes it harder to mouse across to the far edges, adds to fatigue, and frankly too much is missed if it is on the periphery of our vision.

As a user experience designer, I need to be aware of these balance points, and not design experiences that make the user work too hard for the reward of the information they are trying to get to. Making it easier, quicker, more responsive within the frame or window, that’s the ticket.

Ultimately, we design for a variety of screens and devices. We use media queries to determine which stylesheets to use, and how the responsive widths will display the information. We have come a long way from the old world of print, with fixed layouts that are static. The end user wants control of their device, and of their experience. If we listen to that, and pay attention, we will design in a way that respects the person’s wish to change their screen contrast, the fonts, the sizes and the colors. Good design can take all these things into account, and become even more relevant to the person we are designing the experience for. That’s what modern design aims for – the right sized experience in the hands of people with all kinds of different needs.