It's about time for a LifeTips books update, so here's where we are:

 We just finished two books, the LifeTips 101 Public Relations Tips by Mary White book and American Bridal's wedding tips book. They came out great, and we're moving on down our list of books in production. I've just started editing Sheri Ann Richerson's 101 English Garden Tips book, so depending on how many other projects come in the door and how long the printer takes to set up, we're probably looking at 2-5 weeks on that one (there can be up to 2.5 weeks of waiting for the printing company to do their prepress stuff, and my availability to do editing and layout for books depends, as I said, on what other projects we have going on)

 Now that I have a better feel for book production, I think it would be helpful to outline the process:

1. The author writes the book. This should involve at least one round of copyediting by a competent person, or two or three rounds of REALLY CAREFUL self-editing. The single best way to make sure your book comes out quickly and without problems is for your manuscript to be well-organized and error-free.
   
2. The author submits the book. What I'm about to say is a pretty significant departure from what LifeTips policy has been, but I'm personally amenable to writers submitting books in .doc form over email. I lay out books in InDesign, so it's easier for me to import text from a .doc file than the .xls our cms gives me. In the future, I'll create a .doc template for writers to download and use for their manuscripts.
3. I edit the book. This is the stage that is likely to take up the most time if the manuscript hasn't been carefully edited already. Layout is a fairly automatic process, but editing requires a lot of time and attention. In addition, manuscripts with glaring errors of grammar or style can change significantly in the editing process, so a round of careful edits on your part is the best way to ensure that what you write is what gets printed.
4. I lay out the book. This is a relatively straightforward process that takes up to a week or so, depending on how busy we are.
5. I make a .pdf of the book. If the author wants, I can email him or her this pdf for review. That review is time for fixing glaring errors: if a tip has been included twice, if there are problems with numbering, etc. It's the exact wrong time to come up with a lot of text edits--those should all have been made in the very beginning. It's also the wrong time to decide on major changes to the structure of the book; again, that's what the beginning of the process is for.
6. Once the review is done, I send the book to the printing company, which does its own prepress work. That can take up to two and a half weeks, and when it's done, the book is available for printing through us. A month later (give or take) it's available on Amazon.com.

It's time for Round Two of Raph's List of Cool Things on the Internet. The first and coolest thing is Many Eyes. It's an online tool that helps users graphically represent information in any number of ways. It also has user-loaded data sets that can be represented and manipulated, from census data to the texts of craigslist personal ads. Some of the textual tools are the most interesting. You can take the text of a speech to Congress, for instance, and view it as an arrangement of most-used words, with the most common words writ largest. Or you can see every use of the word "earth" in Whitman's Leaves of Grass organized by prepositional phrase. It sounds obscure, but  those kinds of graphics reveal some very basic things about the way we use language.

Also, I've decided that there's a much more important matter on which I'd like to get some kind of consensus. First, you need to watch this and this. Trust me, they're worth it. Now the question: penguin or warthog?

File under research material:

The RealClear sites are hardly new, but they should be mentioned. RealClearPolitics.com got a lot of attention during the election, both for its aggregation of content and for its (in the end, pretty accurate) average of the polling numbers. Its sister sites, RealClearWorld, -Markets, and -Sports, all work on the same essential premise as The Week Magazine (itself a powerhouse of informational efficiency)--little original reporting, but exhaustive aggregation of articles from other sources. RealClearWorld is especially useful, because in this country it's hard to find, for instance, a Moscow newspaper in English without help.

 File under entertainment:

Another relatively mature platform is Pandora, a customizeable internet  radio station online at Pandora.com. Pandora lets you set up preferences by selecting songs you like and then streams other songs like the ones you selected. It doesn't allow you to play individual songs whenever you want, but it's great for leaving on while you do other things, and it's an excellent way to learn about new artists.

We live in a dangerous world. It's possible for even small children to get online and come into contact with truly corrupting and dangerous influences. The worst of these is unquestionably that arch-nemesis of english teachers everywhere: POOR GRAMMAR. Today, I'll teach you to protect yourself from POOR GRAMMAR with a few simple rules. Remember, internet safety starts with YOU!

One of the most common grammar errors is failure to recognize the difference between a plural noun and a possessive. We call this a "gateway error." You start out talking about "all the baseball's," and don't think that's a problem. But within months you'll be trolling Youtube, writing in all caps all the time, and misspelling any word with more than two syllables. Don't let your loved ones experience that heartbreak.

So what's the difference between a plural and a possesssive? Good question! A plural is a noun which specifies that there is more than one of a thing. Most nouns in English become plural when you add an "s" or "es" to the end: baseballs, velociraptors, paradoxes. Nouns that end in "y" often take "ies" to become plural: democracies, realities. Some other nouns don't follow any pattern: people, geese, men, women. The last category is tough; you just need to learn them individually.

On the other hand we have possessives--nouns that indicate ownership. These are formed by adding an apostrophe and an "s" to the nouns that own other nouns: the sheep's wool, the boy's dog, the lady's hat. An exception is when the possessive noun already ends in "s;" then only an apostrophe is added, as in "together, all the families' resources helped build the town." Notice that when plurals are also possessives they often take only an apostrophe, because they already end in "s."

There are two things to which you should pay special attention: acronyms and the word "its." "Its" is the exception to the possessive rule; "its" is possessive, while "it's" means "it is." So "It's a beautiful day" means "It is a beautiful day" and "the TV has its own remote" means "there is a remote which belongs to the TV."

Which brings us to acronyms. Acronyms becom plural the same way almost everything else does: by adding "s." The plural of CD, for instance, is CDs; the plural of JPEG is JPEGs. Adding apostrophe "s" to acronyms makes them possessive: FEMA's massive failure, the USA's enormous deficit.

Now you know the difference between plurals and possessives. Remember, NO ONE can force you to use bad grammar if you don't want to. Not even the internet. 

Slate just published an article about why everyone is saying "fail" all of a sudden, which gets almost exactly 75% of its facts right. In that direction, I present to you a brief glossary of what the kids on the internet are saying these days:

Teh, taht :alternate spellings of the words "the," and "that," respectively, for comic effect, i.e. "dude, taht bike is teh awesome"

The construction of an article follwed by an adjective, "nouning" the adjective i.e. "teh awesome" : whatever the meaning of the adjective is, although the article is almost always "the," or "teh." Popular constructions include "teh awesome" and "teh suck"

sXe : not actually internet slang, it's a contraction of straight-edge, a commitment to not use drugs or alcohol.

FTW: For The Win, i.e. "Red Sox FTW"

USE OF CAPS LOCK: makes everything funny.

Interwebz, intarwubz, inferweb, etc: ironic spellings of "internet"--the connotation being that people make way to big a deal out of what's become a truly basic technology.

-zorz or -z0rz: usually used as a suffix of "pwn" or "own." Adds emphasis. "Dude, you just got pwnz0rd." This is falling into disuse.

1337: pronounced "leet" : the gamer alphabet composed of numbers and symbols.

Indiscriminate use of the letter "z": emphasis, also sets tone, i.e. "dudez this is teh awesome"

There are a lot more out there, and UrbanDictionary.com has done a far better job than I could of collecting and defining them. In conclusion, I'd just like to point out that what's emerging here is a new iteration of the ironic tense, which saw a recent incarnation in the "bad means good" of the 80s and 90s. It's characterized by the way it confoms to the worst stereotypes of what geeks are supposed to be like (introverted math and CS people with no sense of grammar or usage) and by the constant implication of hilarity where the uninitiated see none. Your homework: tell me why the phrase "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" is funny, using at least one example.

In some cases it is thought that writing in passive voice, and using lots of unnecessary, unhelpful, meaningless, additional, and redundant words is a good way to write. It is thought that this gives the impression of being knowledgeable, impartial, official, sanctioned, or authoritative. Likewise, it is held that to write in this way will, by presenting ever-more-convoluted sentence structure, necessitate additional verbiage which will in turn have an inflationary effect on word count. Unfortunately, included in this model is an increase in the time spent by your faithful editors to correct and indeed often to simply understand the meaning, drive, point, or essential message of your tips. And in the event that even editors are unable to decipher the buried import of your communiqués, what hope can reasonably be said to be possessed by the public or our clients?

Please. This company depends on the quality of its writing. It’s that simple. As editors, we provide direction, assign tasks, and polish copy. Total rewrites aren’t part of the job.

After hours of dilligent work by yours truly, I've succeeded in uncovering (read: Aaron gave me) the original Indesign template for the LifeTips book series. This means that we should be getting back on track with putting out the backlog of books we've accumulated. I'm not sure whether that will be enough to pull the US economy out of what my last editor used to call the "pre-cession," but it sure made my week.

I'd bring out another rant against one of the many grammatical abuses that make me want to burn down the internet if I wasn't forced to acknowledge that there's someone who in his nitpicking, hypocritical passive-aggression has even me beat. In his essay "Politics and the English Language" George Orwell lashed out about the people who were hurting the written word. His main points were:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

There's a sixth rule too, but if you haven't read the rest of the essay you shouldn't be trusted with it. I'm also declaring a moratorium on the words "experience," "encounter" and "then." Have a good week!

If there's one thing I've "learned" in my, well, ever, it's that when something in the world bothers you, the best and most effective way to do something about it is always to complain about it online. So today I have a very special rant prepared about your friend and mine, the intarwubz.

The internet was the offspring of a military network of computers. Early on, the convention was that "the Internet" got a capital "I" while "an internet," --that is, any set of networked computers--got a small "i."  It was also the convention that "Web" was capitalized because it stood in for the proper noun "World Wide Web." The AP and most US media (Wired magazine being the notable exception) still use this convention, presumably because they haven't realized how far down the line that particular train is yet. In England such capitalization is much less common; the Times of London stylesheet has "internet" lowercased.

It's still possible to argue over whether the internet is still a unique and specific enough entity to warrant a proper noun; the point is that it's a stupid argument and a waste of time. We don't capitalize "plumbing," or "power grid" or "economy." Capitalizing "internet" is a throwback to a time when it really was a largely exclusive network, before everyone used it daily.

Anyway, technically those things are supposed to be capitalized, so I can't really fly off the handle at anyone who capitalizes them. But in the words of Moliere, "I'll be quiet, but I'll be thinking hard."

Hi, I'm the new editorial assistant here at LifeTips. My jobs include everything, plus everything no one else wants to do. Basically, I'm fueled by coffee, pizza and grammar OCD.

My phrase of the week, month, year and possibly decade is "enlightened self-interest." In that area, I have a suggestion for all of you (from what I've seen, really good) writers. Word count. Don’t make tips too short or too long. If you’re writing a tip about how to bake a cake, and it reads: “assemble the ingredients, then bake the cake,” it doesn’t include enough research. On the other hand, if your tip is “how to bake” and it takes 200 words just to explain how to bake cookies, you should break it up into four or five 150-200 word tips. Sticking to the word count is the best way to make sure that you’re not doing more work than you’re being paid for.