DeaconBlues (imported) wrote: Mon Oct 20, 2008 10:26 pm
But honestly, when I read some of the threads here in the forums about "proper formating" and paragraph breaks and punctuation and the like, I get VERY discouraged.
My main comment is: your note in the forum is in exactly the right form -- see, you know how to do it already. You made paragraphs, used quote characters in appropriate places, and expressed yourself. If you can do it in that comment form, you can do it in other places.
I would suggest that you use software program that is simple, but not so simple that it lacks spell-check. Word fills the bill if you are used to it, but there may be other things that work better for you. Notepad and Wordpad (both are included free with Windows) can do it too, though they don't have spell-check (I don't think). Google Docs might be an option.
The other thing about simplicity is to keep to just the things that are easy to get from the keyboard, without using font sizes or fancy symbols or other things that can make a printed document look good. Those fancy things sometimes don't transfer well when you copy from one place to another. If you see an option "paste as plain text" that is almost always better than pasting with all the fancy formatting.
I know a lot of people find copy (or cut) and paste to fail more often than it works. I would recommend you find a neighbor who is proficient to help you practice. You could grab some text from lipsum.com and practice copying and pasting it from web page to Word to Notepad to Wordpad to Word again, just to see how it works. I think you'll feel more comfortable in no time.
The other thing that gets people discouraged is losing everything they've been working on, and the solution to that is saving a lot of copies. What I'd recommend is, every day or even twice a day, hit "save as" (wherever Word hides it this week) and save it with a different filename linked to that day/time, like LoremIpsum-2010-10-23-am.doc, then save it back to your working copy, LoremIpsum.doc. That way each day you have a copy of that day's work. If you really mess up your working copy, you can go back to yesterday or the day before. Another backup/versioning option that is fairly easy to use is Dropbox.com, which keeps multiple versions of files automatically online, as long as you remember to save your documents in the "My Dropbox" folder, not just in "My Documents".
You could also practice by sending a draft as a private message to your friends. I'd be willing to look at the formatting and give feedback, and wouldn't tease you if your first few efforts weren't perfect.
I don't have time to log in every day, so you might need to wait a few days for a response.
.