Saving money, writing in TeX
I've switched many of my writing tasks to TeX, and it's time I talked about that decision. I wrote a paper for a class last term in TeX, and I think that was the official beginning. Well, I guess I'd tried and failed to write a paper in TeX before, so my paper for Curtis LeBaron's class was my first success. EndNote and Office 2008 for the Mac don't get along yet, so TeX has a couple months to cement itself as my paper-writing environment of choice.
Some of you may have no idea what I'm talking about. For you, I recommend Wikipedia and CTAN: WHat are TeX, LaTeX, and Friends? Basically, TeX lets me write papers without having to format them at the same time. It uses tags to give formatting directions, then I run some command business, and wala, a PDF appears! I'm using it instead of Word because Word makes me angry when I'm trying to write papers for ACM conferences (e.g. GROUP, CSCW) with figures and/or tables. I'm also afraid of using Word for my dissertation because the rules about formatting are super-strict, and I bet Word could screw it up. TeX and the software I need to do my writing are also FREE. 100% FREE. The latest and greatest reason for me to use TeX, though, is that TeX + BibTeX works and Word 2008 + EndNote doesn't. Putting references into a paper by hand is not an option. My dissertation proposal is only 19 pages long, and 2 of those pages are a single-spaced citation list. Sean, Jude, and I are working on a paper for CSCW that has 9 references, and each reference appears in the text a couple of times. You can see that I'm not going to be able to keep track of all those citations myself, let alone switch between citation styles (e.g. between APA 5th and ACM proceedings).
So, TeX + BibTeX beat out Word 2008 + EndNote. How do I do it? I'm also using Windows occasionally now, and because TeX documents are plain text, they couldn't care less which OS I'm using. If you're somewhat comfortable with markup (e.g. HTML, XML), TeX may be a good option for you. Even with the student discount, Office 2008 is $50, and EndNote will probably be $90 again when they have a version that works with Office 2008 - likely summer 2008. Save yourself the $140 and give TeX a shot.
I use TeXShop and BibDesk on the Mac (available in the MacTeX package), and I wouldn't recommend other software. I tried iMacTeX or some such thing, and it was awful. TeXShop has a bunch of built-in AppleScripts that are helpful including Bibliography which automatically does the latex-bibtex-latex-latex order that you need to run in order to get a PDF with a properly formatted reference section. If you miss Bibliography in the dropdown list, you'll change the color scheme of your TeXShop windows, and there's no menu for resetting them. Instead, to change the background color of your source window, get the RGB values of the color you'd like, open up Terminal and use these commands (where XX = the appropriate R, G, or B value):
defaults write TeXShop background_R 0.XX
defaults write TeXShop background_G 0.XX
defaults write TeXShop background_B 0.XX
Similarly, you can change the colors of the text and the insertion point using foreground_R, insertionpoint_R and the like.
Now that I'm humming along on my dissertation and a couple of papers for CSCW, I'll probably be posting TeX tips. I get stuck a lot, and you probably will too when you get started.
Writing tips you might like too
Writing is incredibly hard. Well, good writing is anyway. I've had the fortune to get some writing guidance in person from Karl Weick and in book form from Howard Becker. I thought you might enjoy some of their tips as well. I've shared these with my students, and the ones who tried them did write more effectively than those who didn't. I hope the same is true for me.
Both of the tips in this post aim to limit intellectual laziness in writing. One has to do with passive voice and the other with "to be" verbs. Writing in passive voice (e.g. "The post was tagged.") and using "to be" verbs ("This blog is an example of social media.") allow authors to make leaps that are unjustified and intellectually lazy. You may have noticed that passive voice and "to be" verbs go hand-in-hand; let's see if we can bust 'em up.
By saying, "The post was tagged," I allow myself to get away without saying who or what tagged the post. Becker (1986, p. 8 ) points out that such a sentence is a theoretical error and not just bad writing. I allow some abstract being to do the tagging, and that means my explanation of events is incomplete. Lazy! Instead, I should say, "I tagged the post." Sure, it uses the same number of words, but who did the tagging and what was tagged are both clear in that sentence. That sentence avoids implicitly invoking abstract forces.
"This blog is an example of social media," causes more confusion than it explains. Understanding the sentence requires that we know what a blog is and what social media is. Instead, I should describe what the blog does and how that makes it part of this superclass - social media. This tip - to stop equating things or calling them examples and instead to explain what's happening - came from Karl Weick during a class in the fall of 2006.
I find doing a "find and replace" search in Word where I replace "to be" verbs with highlighted versions of themselves to be very helpful. I was surprised to find that I'm not the only one who does that - Deborah De Rosa does it too. Highlighting all the places where I use "to be" verbs makes it easy for me to go back to each instance and make sure it's appropriate. It's worth a shot if you're struggling from passivity and/or laziness.
I'm likely to blog about Becker's book more as I work my way through it. In choosing a grounded theory and actor-network theory approach to my dissertation, I made sure it would be hard for me to write. Tips like Becker's and Weick's help keep me careful while writing, and that's the help I need when trying to be descriptive without resorting prematurely to explanation.
Reference
Becker, H. (1986) Writing for Social Scientists. University of Chicago Press.
*Note: Becker's book is hard to find sometimes. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for hunting it down in Portland for me!