19. Logic & Internet.     

Unintended Humor:

These are reported as actual instructions given by manuals or directions accompanying consumer products.  One hardly knows who to blame: the writers who may have thought this stuff up on their own; the lawyers who demanded such warnings; or perhaps the consumers who wrote to make complaints along the bizarre lines suggested.  The general advice to avoid such writing might be: engage brain before writing.

Sears hairdryer:  Do not use while sleeping.

Fritos: You could be a winner!  No purchase necessary.  Details inside the bag.

Dial soap: Directions: use like regular soap.

Swanson frozen dinners: Serving suggestions: defrost.

Bottom of Tesco's Tiramisu dessert box: Do not turn upside down.

Marks & Spencer's Bread Pudding: Product will be hot after heating.

Rowenta iron: Do not iron clothes on body.

Boot's CHILDREN'S (their capitals) Cough Medicine: Do not drive a car or 
     operate machinery after taking this medication.

Nytol sleeping pills: Warning: may cause drowsiness.

Christmas lights: For indoor or outdoor use only.

Japanese food processor: Not to be used for the other use.

Sainsbury's peanuts: Warning: contains nuts. [Peanuts are not nuts.]

American Airlines' peanuts: Instructions: open packet, eat nuts.

Superman Halloween costume: Wearing of this this garment does not enable you to fly.

Swedish chain saw: Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals.

Palmolive dish washing liquid: Do not use on food.

Crest toothpaste: If swallowed, contact poison control.

All brand laundry detergent: Remove clothing before distributing in washing machine.

Windshield sunshade: Do not drive car with the sunshade in place.

Here is another list taken from church bulletins:

	Don't let worry kill you -- let the church help.
	Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church & community.
	For those of you who have children & don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.
	This afternoon there will be a meeting in the South & North ends of the church.   Children will be baptized at both ends.
	Tues. at 4pm there will be an ice cream social.  All ladies giving milk will please come early.
	Thurs. at 5pm there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers Club.  All wishing to become  little mothers, please see the minister in his study.
	This being East, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward & lay an egg on the altar.
	The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind & they may be seen in the  church basement Friday.
	At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "what is Hell?"; come early & listen  to our choir practice.

E-mail: 

Here is part of the "Course Rules" for an online course I recently taught:

E-Mail: When you send me an e-mail, 
Make sure it has your name on it.
Not your user name or your e-mail address. 
Unless you want me to send your grade to the registrar for bluebeard@aol-
or cupcake@yahoo or something similar (:
give me the same name that the registrar has for you 
on every e-mail you send. 

Right up until the end of the course I continued to receive e-mail with no "real" name on it.  I am not talking about three or four marginal students.  Perhaps as many as a quarter of the 300 e-mail messages I received did not have a "real" name, much less a signature file at the end of the message.  The subject line was usually missing as well.  Sometimes, I could look up the alias names and e-mail account addresses of students -- but did I?  Like everyone else, I didn't have the time.  And why should I bother when I gave what I considered to be unmistakably clear directions?

E-mail generated at work is usually a kind of memo.  It should conform to the usual expectations of memos:

• Use a template to generate the standard features: To, From, Date, Subject.
• Use a signature file to indicate who you are, what your title is, and how you can be reached (e.g., multiple e-mail addresses, phone, fax).  Append mottos at your own risk.  Sometimes they are funny or insightful, but they rarely connote professionalism.
  • How to do it: 
  • In Outlook (the MS mail program), click on "Tools," then "Options."  Click on "Mail Format."  Look for "Signature picker" at the bottom.  Click it to create a signature file that will be appended to the bottom of your e-mail messages.
• Focus on a single topic. The rule for memos is: one problem, one memo; two problems; write two memos.
• Use bullets or other organizational patterns, including headlines.
• Think about diction levels and remember that e-mail is archived.  Tones are difficult to imply and more difficult to infer.  If you choose a colloquial level, so-called emoticons help to clarify your tone; e.g.,  :-) (smile)  ;-)  (wink).
• Remember that e-mail is not as ephemeral as it seems.  Imagine that your boss can read whatever you send.  E-mail generated at work is not private.  Do not send e-mail to vent emotions. 
• Slow down long enough to let the spell checker do its work.
• Check the reply button. Sometimes you mistakenly reply to multiple recipients when you believe that you are replying to a single author.  Same thing with the forward button.
• Change to the html format to control many elements in the appearance of your e-mail document (font type, size, color, italics, bold, bullets, indents, etc.). 
• Think about the privacy of a message before you forward it to all your friends who then promptly forward it to all of their friends.
• When you paste in Web addresses, give the entire url (e.g., http://www.go.com) because many mail programs allow readers to open their browser and access the url by simply clicking on the link.
• Think about the size of photographs or other large files.  These used to blow up my account making it inaccessible until I used telnet to log in and run Pine to delete the file.
• When your message grows beyond 25 lines, think about switching to Word and attaching the document to a cover e-mail. 
• Use your word processor to compose fairly long messages.  This will allow you to use such features as on-the-fly spelling and grammar checkers, and generally change your writing situation from dashing off a "post it" note to composing a document.  Copy and paste the text into your e-mail program.
• Even in short e-mail, consider the appearance & layout.  
• Answer e-mail promptly.
• Create a few folders to save e-mail for a few weeks.

E-mail Queries: 

Do you get enough spam or junk e-mail?  I am sure you do.  Ron just told me about Spam Cop: http://spamcop.net/   If you send e-mail to someone you don't know, be sure that they can quickly tell that your message is not spam by composing a useful subject line.

• Be conscious of making a good first impression.  
  • Write a clear subject line.
  • Use a professional tone.  
  • Explain why you contacted the person or use a "hook" to capture interest.  
• Be concise instead of rambling.  Use bullets to specify discrete questions or points.
• Do a bit of homework.  Before contacting the person, do a Web search to see what you can find by or about the person.  If you know her organizational affiliation, do a search at the business Website.
• If possible, offer quid pro quo by promising to let the person know the results of your study or otherwise trying to make it worth his while to write to you.
• Provide some biographical or personal information about yourself, e.g., a relevant page or publication at your Website (resume, photos, etc.).
• If you swap several messages, don't too quickly think you are best friends.  Several times I have answered e-mail questions from students who found my Website from doing searches on subjects I have written about.  After two or three messages, I am sometimes "stroked" or conned into doing someone's homework.  
• Most e-mail contacts and messages are professional.  You should use an informal tone, but be cautious about sending gratuitous, over-friendly messages about your vacation, new girl-friend, or how you feel about the world at large and 47 things in particular.  Because I answered a couple of his questions, I have regularly received lengthy reviews of books for the last two years from an Indian graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy at a German university.  This is probably not the best way to make contacts.
• Many people have a "friends" list to whom they forward jokes, pictures, and gossip.  Be careful who you put on it.  Don't let it grow too large.  Periodically think through the entries.  Better yet, don't get in the habit of automatically forwarding such stuff.

E-mail Accounts: 

It is easy to end up with a half dozen  e-mail addresses.  I know I have addresses in cyberspace that I have forgotten.  I hope the spammers blow them up.  It doesn't matter, unless someone sends information you are waiting for to an address you never check.  No doubt there are programs that will go check all your accounts, if you remember to enter them in the program.  I can't even remember all the passwords I have at a couple of dozen sites.  Unless you love spending time entering such stuff in your palm pilot, think about not proliferating e-mail addresses.

Hard to believe, but some people do not have e-mail addresses.  Several years ago I recall going through a process of redefining my professional and personal contacts.  If they didn't have e-mail addresses, they became too hard to reach.  International contacts in places like China or India or Africa may have very unreliable e-mail.  Ask for an immediate return to know that they received your message.

Online Documents: 

The first question to ask is when to put your documents online.  

Advantages of a Printed Document:

• Readers are familiar with it.  There is no computer anxiety or required training.
• It may be cheaper, if the document is not frequently revised, because there is no cost for networked computers.
• It is personal; readers can hi-lite the document with markers or otherwise mark it up so that it becomes a personal reference.
• It is a portable possession; the document belongs to the reader who hopefully knows where he put it.
• It provides traditional retrievability functions: table of contents, headings, tabs, abstract, glossary, and index.
• Readers say that it is easier to read than documents appearing on a monitor or screen.
• An array of printed documents still seems to better aid composition, integration, referencing, and other writing tasks.
• Aesthetics. Large format brochures featuring glossy photos continue to serve a unique purpose.
• Stability.  Fires and floods and age may destroy print documents, but viruses and computer hardware problems will not destroy them.

Advantages of an Online Document:

• It is cheap to produce, distribute, update, and maintain.  There can be an argument about how the numbers are construed.  Do you count the price of computers that are replaced every three years?  Networking, ISPs, a systems administrator?  How about indirect costs of fighting hackers?  And what happens when the system crashes, a hard drive fails, or you otherwise lose data?
• Accessible.  Data is available when readers need it (if they can find it).  They do not have to fly to Cleveland or use inter-library loan or search for a manual.
• Accessible.  Hypertext and links allow readers to access information without searching page-by-page through print material.  Links can provide exactly the information that readers are looking for -- if the writer has done a good job with audience analysis.  
• Accessible.  Search engines can sometimes quickly do what it used to take hours to do in a library or archive.  "Garbage in, garbage out" is still a limitation.  Useful documents are often inaccessible to those who have not paid a subscription fee.
• Interactive.  Readers can often learn computer skills more quickly by using the program and its tutorials than by reading about it in manuals.  Interestingly this works the other way as well.  Every new software release spawns a half dozen or more operation manuals.  
• Uniformity.  Online documents ensure that all readers are looking at the same information.  Because such documents are frequently revised, you should take care to prominently label documents for their release number and/or date.
• Revisions, new releases.  Documents can be revised and distributed at a small fraction of the cost of revising and distributing print media documents.  This often speeds the process of development by shortening the reaction time to customer complaints.
• Storage.  A few CDs or Zip disks versus building a library.

Almost every issue in professional writing requires checking the audience again.  If target readers are not familiar with computers, they will resist using them.  In contrast, those who use computers daily may be annoyed if they are told to find information in printed sources, grumbling that they could have found the stuff in minutes if it were online.  The solution is provided by standard technical writing advice: repetition.  If money permits, duplicate.  I am thinking more of computer manuals rather than The Physicians Companion to Prescription Drugs, car parts lists, and other huge data bases that frequently change.  The impetus for these is to replace print documents with Internet or CD-ROM publications.

How Hard Is It to Put Documents Online? 

If you can produce documents with word processing software, you can produce online documents.  In the old days -- about six years ago -- we "did it by hand"; that is, we wrote html code into the document so that it would display properly in a browser.  Forget all that.  You probably use Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator as a browser.  Both browsers also have html programs.  In Netscape look at the top bar for "Communicator."  Open it to choose "Composer."  In IE-5, open "File" to choose "Edit with Microsoft Frontpage."  
These programs work much like word processing programs.  There are two or three differences.  

• You have to think much more about page layout and the use of graphics.  
• You have to think more about path ways to save images you find on the Internet and to link both graphics and hypertext references.
• You have to upload files to an Internet server and see that they display properly.

In my professional writing classes, I use the book Web Design for Dummies by Lisa Lopuck.  Hungry Minds, 2001: 0764508237:  $25 at amazon.com.  You can find many other similar books or by-pass the print media documents and get to work by following the directions offered at host sites like Geocities: http://geocities.yahoo.com/

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