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COMPUTING  FOR
 COPY EDITORS
Or
Take My Hand, Im a Stranger in Gigabytes
 
 
 
 
 
By Beryl Adcock
Knight Foundation Copy Editing Fellow
from The Charlotte Observer
The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Spring 1997


If you know your way around a Macintosh computer, lay this aside right now. If you know what http stands for,  youre too advanced for this guide.
This is for those of us who are pretty darn handy with our main-frame word processors on the job, but are lost when somebody hands us a mouse.

If youre like me, youre starting to feel left behind. Graphics, and even full pages, are designed on Macs, and copy editors have extra work if they don't know how to use one to make corrections.

Editing printed-out copy is possible, but sends us back to the days of pencil and paper journalism. (A new technology should help us advance, not send us back.)
And many newsrooms are installing World Wide Web browsers, giving newsroom employees Internet access and opening up new possibilities for copy editing: The world can be your reference shelf.

But first, we have to learn to use these new tools.

For me, trying to learn was sometimes frustrating: People often assumed I knew more than I did (which was zip), or used terms I didnt understand (in the dialog box, choose the formats option). Or theyd plunge in at the middle, without explaining the basics first.
So I wrote this the way I wish someone had taught me about the Mac, the Web and their capabilities. I hope it helps you begin to know your way around.

I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. The more I learn, the more I realize how much there  is to know. But I've learned enough to feel comfortable editing and writing, surfing the Net and exploring.

Meet the Mac

Lets start with an overview of the Macintosh monitor (viewing screen) and keyboard. Sit down at your nearest unoccupied Mac and lets have a look.

The monitor probably looks pretty much the same as your word processors monitor. It has a switch in the back or on the right side of the front to turn it on or off. (Yes, even that stumped me the first time I tried to turn on a Mac the monitor was off!)

So if the screen shows no signs of life when you turn on the computer, look for the on/off button. (A small green light glows on the front of the monitor when it is on.)

Under or to the side of your monitor will be the central processing unit (CPU), which houses the hard drive (the computers main memory) and has a place for you to insert floppy disks.

In back of theCPU are plugs called portals where you can add a modem, plug in a printer, etc.

The keyboard, too, is roughly the same as your word processors, with a few differences.
To the upper right is a button with an arrow; this turns on the computer (but doesnt turn it off; well get to that later).

To the upper left is the escape key, useful for when your screen freezes up (more on that later).

The F keys on the first row of the keyboard provide shortcuts to a variety of tasks. You can get along fine without them for starters. Other things you can get along fine without are the numerical keys at the far right of the keyboard.

To the left of those numerical keys are buttons that mostly move your cursor around: up, down, left, right, page up, page down, end, etc.

Theres also a help key that sends an SOS to the computer that you need more information about whatever program youre working on.

For example, striking the help key in the Microsoft Word program Im writing this with offers me help with indexing, indenting lines and paragraphs, creating and deleting documents and much more.

Finally, we come to the main part of the keyboard, which is set up like a typewriter (remember those?), with a few exceptions.

At the top right is the delete key, which you can use to delete one letter at a time, one word, a paragraph or more.

At the bottom left and right are the control, option and command keys (the command key is the one with the apple and squiggly-looking rectangle on it). These give access to a variety of functions and shortcuts, and youll use them frequently.

Eek! A mouse

The mouse is a little intimidating for first-time Mac users, but just think of it as a faster way to get around your video screen than using the cursor arrows.

It takes a little practice to get adept at using it, but your clumsy feeling will soon go away. Once you get used to it, you may wish your word processor had one!

The mouses tail comes out the back and plugs into your keyboard. On top of the mouse is a button you push, or click, to open files, move items around on your screen or in a document, and perform many, many more functions.

Youll use the button these ways, depending on what action youre executing:
1. Click: Press and release the button quickly. To select what you want.

2. Double click: Press and release it twice in quick succession. To open a document or launch a software program.

3. Click and drag: Press and hold down the button, move the mouse across its pad, then release the button. To highlight a letter, word or paragraph or to move items around.
Note: You can move the mouse all over the pad (and therefore move the cursor all over the screen), but until you click its not actually changing anything on your screen.
If you'd have to move the mouse all the way off the pad to execute an action, just move it around quickly in circles on the pad and you'll change the area of the screen it's moving around on.

Flip the mouse over and youll see a small ball through the opening on its bottom. The ball turns as you glide the mouse over the pad, and the cursor, known as the pointer, moves as the ball rolls.

The mouse pad provides the friction necessary to keep the ball rolling smoothly.
If the mouses movements become jerky, the ball probably needs a gentle cleaning. Unscrew the round piece surrounding the ball, remove the ball and swab it and the round piece with a little alcohol, and put everything back together.

The Macintosh screen

Now youre ready to start familiarizing yourself with the monitor screen. The screen you see with the Macintosh Operating System (which is the basic software that runs your computer) looks very different from the word processor you may be used to.

This system is designed to do a lot more than just process text, and its not set up in a linear fashion like the SII or Atex systems copy editors are used to. So you may have to readjust your thinking a bit as to what a computer screen looks like and how you move around on one.

At first, I had a hard time understanding that several stories, or files, can be open at once on a Mac screen and several different types of software can be running at once.
Someone may have a page layout under way using QuarkXpress software on the left side of the screen. Maybe someone is working on a memo in Microsoft Word on the right side of the screen.

And lets say a copy editor came over to make some corrections on a graphic, created by an artist with Adobe Illustrator software, and has left it open at the bottom of the screen while he checks on a few changes.

Confused? The key to comprehension is realizing that the Macs desktop, or screen, was designed to work much like a real desk. You can store files directly on the desktop, in folders on the desktop, on the hard drive or on a floppy disk.

(Storing them on a floppy is similar to putting the files away in a drawer, off the top of your desk; insert the floppy into your computer and you have, in effect, taken the files out of the drawer and laid them on your desktop.)

And you can have several files lying on your desk at once, or several folders lying open on your desk. You can also move items around, make them bigger or smaller, or lay one on top of another.

One difference between your Mac desktop and your real-life desktop is that with Mac you can have only one of your open files active at a time. The file that is active will be brighter than the ones around it. Click your mouse outside that files window and it will dim, becoming inactive. Click your mouse inside the window and it will brighten, becoming active again.

If the file you want is behind an active window on your desktop, no problem. Just click on the desktop area and the other open windows will appear. Then click on the desired file and presto, it will pop in front of the other one.

You can make changes in a file only when it is active, so you dont have to worry that youll mess up someone elses stuff on the screen while youre working on yours.

Files and folders

A file is one discrete document in the computer. It may be a graphic, a photograph, a memo, a story or a page layout. (Its similar to a story on your word processor.)
 
A folder is a collection of those files in one place on the computer (similar to a basket on your word processor).

If a designer says, The Sunday arts front layout is in the features folder on the graphics server, you look for the graphics server icon on the desktop, double-click on it to open it,  look for the features folder and double-click to open it. You then look for the layout you want, double-clicking on it to open it.

Icons

Icons are little pictures on the desktop with names under them that represent the files and software programs stored on your computer. Double-click on them and you open a folder or launch a particular software program.

The computer Im writing this on has four icons, one each for the hard drive, the trash, the printer and the file I have open from my floppy disk.

The computers the designers work on at my newspaper and the ones in the labs here at UNC have as many as a dozen icons showing on the desktop, each representing various folders or software programs.

The trash is where you stash stuff you dont want anymore. Hold down the mouse button on the icon for the file or folder you want to get rid of and drag it to the trash can icon. When the word trash lights up, release the button.

The trash can bulges when theres something in it. The files you toss in there dont actually go away until you clean out the trash (more on that later).

Anatomy of a window

At this point, ask someone to copy a file for you to play with on the Mac, so you wont worry about messing up anything. Youll want to practice moving and reshaping windows, for starters.

When a document is open on the desktop, it appears in a rectangular box called a window. The windows various parts let you shape it as you wish, open and close it, and move around in it.

Running across the top of the window is a gray bar with horizontal lines in it. This is the title bar, displaying the name of the file you have open. Click and drag on the title bar and you can move the file around on your screen. Click once in the small box in the left corner of the title bar and the file will close.

Click once in the zoom box, in the right corner of the bar, and the file will resize itself to fit the document within it. You can then toggle between the new size and former size by clicking in that box.

On the right side of the window is the vertical scroll bar: Youll see arrows at the top and bottom of the bar, and maybe a small box between them. Holding down the mouse button on these arrows lets you scroll up or down through the file.
 
If all of the file doesnt fit on the screen, a gray box appears between the arrows, indicating there is more of the file above or below whats showing on the screen.

You can also scroll up or down the file by clicking on this box and dragging it up or down the bar (another thing about the Mac is there are often several ways to execute the same action). When you release the mouse button, the screen will jump to the new place.

At the bottom of the window is the horizontal scroll bar, containing arrows (and perhaps a box) used to move the file to the left or right. They work the same way as the vertical arrows and box.

In the lower right corner of the window is the size box. Click and drag this box to make the window smaller or larger, wider or narrower. Youll see a shadow outline of the box as you resize; once you release the button, the window reshapes itself.
Pull-down menus

Across the top of your screen are the menus. Click and hold the mouse button on any of them, and a pop-up menu appears, offering you a range of options.

The file menu, for example, enables you to create a new file, open or close a file, save it, etc. Drag the mouse down to the menu action you wish to execute, and release the button.
If you want to save the file your co-worker copied for you, click on the file menu and drag the mouse down to the save option. Release the button. A dialog box will pop up, asking you to name your new file and to tell the computer where you want to put it, in a certain folder, on the desktop, on a disk, etc.

(Note: Macs dont automatically save work like your word processor does. Each time you close a file, a dialog box will appear asking whether you want to save the changes you have made to it.)

Explore the pull-down menus, clicking and holding on each so you can see the options available to you. If the menu shows an action that isnt currently available to you, it appears as pale gray instead of black.

Right now, for example, I have no text highlighted on my screen, so I cant use the options on the edit menu that allow me to cut, copy and paste text.

If a menu item has ellipses (. . .) after it, clicking on that option opens a dialog box on screen for you to fill in before the action is executed.

Releasing the mouse button on "paragraph" under the format menu, for example, brings up a dialog box that offers you a variety of options to format a paragraph.

You can hop among the options by using the "tab" button below the "esc" key on the left side of the keyboard. Shift tab lets you hop backward. Make changes by clicking on the desired option or highlighting a particular field and filling it in.

You don't want to change anything to the paragraph format after all? Just click on "cancel" and the box will vanish.

Clicking on "Apply" lets you preview the changes you're making in a highlighted paragraph or word.

When you're happy with the changes, click "save."
 
If an item in a dialog box has an arrow beside it, holding down the mouse button on that item will reveal another pull-down menu of choices.

Note: Menus change depending on the software you're using.
Note II: To highlight, click the mouse at the beginning of a line, paragraph or word and drag it to the end of the desired section, then release the button. You highlighted the wrong part? Simply click elsewhere in the text and the highlighting will disappear.

Keyboard shortcuts

While youre trolling among the pull-down menus, you may notice that some of them have characters after them, like command S after the save command on the file menu.
This tells you that particular action has a keyboard shortcut: You can simply hold down the command key, strike the S key (lowercase; using the shift key will execute an entirely different action), then release the command key.

This saves you from having to go to the mouse and the menu to execute that action. To format a paragraph as described above, you can simply strike "command m" instead of clicking on the format menu and dragging down to "paragraph."

Keyboard shortcuts are a fast way to execute actions you use often. Its a good idea to save your work frequently for example, each time you make major changes and its much faster to strike "command s" than repeatedly pull down the file menu to the proper action.
Look at the menus and see which have keyboard shortcuts. An up-pointing arrow means to use the shift key to execute that action on the keyboard.

The other oddly shaped character represents the option key.
  The keyboard shortcut for this action is command option i

Emptying the trash and shutting down

To empty the trash, you first have to bring up the special pull-down menu. To do that, quit the software you have running: Click and drag to "quit" under the file menu, or strike "command q."

Your menus will change to include "special." Drag down to "empty trash" and release the mouse button. A dialog box will appear, asking whether you're sure you want to rid yourself of the items in the trash permanently. Your choices are "OK" or "cancel."
 
The trash dialog box

If you want to see what's in the trash before you empty it, double-click on the trash icon and a window will open, showing you what files are in there.

You'll have to drag a file out of the trash window onto the desktop or into a folder, though, if you want to see what's in it. (Click on the file, drag it onto the desktop area and release the mouse button. Then double-click on the file to open it.) You can drag it back to the trash icon if you decide you still don't want it.

You also can shut down the computer from the special menu. Just click and drag to the "shut down" option. Or click on the apple menu icon to the far top left of your monitor, and drag to "shut down."

If you get stuck,
If your cursor won't move, either with the keyboard or the mouse, your screen has frozen up, as it sometimes does on your word processor. Here are a few things to try. You will lose unsaved work, though, which is why it's best to save frequently! (Every few minutes or paragraphs.)

Hold down the command and control keys and press the "Esc" (or escape) button, which will force-quit the software you're using.

If that doesn't do the trick, restart the computer by holding down the command and control keys and striking the keyboard start button. (Or look for the computer's reset switch. It'll be on the CPU if there is one, marked with a small triangle.)

If you're still frozen, turn off the Mac with the main power switch on the CPU; wait at least 15 seconds, then turn it back on.

Editing in QuarkXpress

If you need to edit text on a page that was designed on a Mac, chances are the page was laid out using the QuarkXpress design software.

This section will very briefly tell you how Quark works, so you can navigate a page and make editing changes yourself rather than having to write your fixes on a printout and hand it off.

If this passage just whets your appetite or you want to learn how to design  in Quark, there are good books available on the subject. I bought "Visual Quickstart Guide: QuarkXpress 3.3 for Macintosh," by Elaine Weinmann (Peachpit Press; $15.95 paperback). It's very simply written and loaded with illustrations.

Getting around

If you open a QuarkXpress file to edit on the Mac, you'll see a newspaper page on your screen that's anywhere from 10 percent to 400 percent of its true size.

The first thing you'll want to know is how to change the size, so you can see the type better for editing purposes. As usual, there are several ways to do that.

The easiest way is to hold down the control key (which turns the pointer into a magnifying glass with a plus sign inside it) and click on the page, which will enlarge it in increments.
To reduce it, hold down the control and the option keys (the pointer will turn into a magnifying glass with a minus sign in it), and click.

As you click the page smaller or larger, notice that the percent size in the bottom left corner of the window changes.

Another way you can change the size of the page is to highlight the number in that corner, type in the percent size you want, such as "50" no need to type "%"   and strike return.)

Want to see the whole page at once on your screen? Use the keyboard shortcut "command 0." (That's zero, not O as in orange.) This reduces the page so it all fits on screen.
You'll notice that when the page is smaller than 100 percent or so the body type appears as solid gray lines rather than text. Don't let that scare you. Enlarge the page, and the type will be readable.

Use the horizontal and vertical scroll bars to move up and down, left and right on the page to find the text you want to edit.

Or hold down the option key, turning the cursor into a grabber hand that you can use to drag the page around when you hold down the mouse button.

When you have a few minutes, explore the menu bar with a good Quark book in your lap. You'll be amazed at what can be done with this program. No wonder designers love it.
 
One elemental thing to know about Quark is that all stories,  headlines, cutlines, photos, etc., on the page are in boxes, drawn by the page designer.
You'll see those boxes as very fine dotted gray lines around the story or cutline you're about to edit.
You must first select the box before you can edit what's inside it, which you do simply by clicking inside it with the content tool (see the next section). That fine gray line will become solid when you select the box, and you can now make changes to what's inside it.
 
A text box that hasn't been selected yet (left), and the same box after it has been selected (notice the line becomes solid).

The QuarkXpress toolbox, or tool palette, is a set of icons representing the tools used to create text and picture boxes and to edit what's inside them.

(If you don't see the toolbox on your screen, go up to the menu bar and hold down the mouse button on "View."  Your options in the pull-down menu will include "Show tools.")

The content tool, which looks like a hand and is the second tool from the top in the box, is the one you'll use for editing.

(The others are mostly for drawing boxes and linking them, for drawing lines, and for moving items around on the page. The magnifying tool, or zoom tool fourth down in the box is yet another way to change the size of the page.)
Make sure the content tool is highlighted before you try to make any changes in a text box. If it isn't, simply click on it.

How to edit

Now you're ready to change the text. This is your chance to practice highlighting text with the mouse as we discussed earlier.

 Here's a nifty Quark trick: Click twice in a paragraph to highlight a particular word, three times to highlight a line, four times to highlight the entire paragraph. Or simply click and drag to highlight the text you want to change.

Once the word/line/paragraph is highlighted, it will be replaced by whatever you type in. Maybe you want to highlight everything  in the box: Strike "command a," or click and drag to "select all" under the edit menu, and all the text in that box will be highlighted.
Remember, if you highlight the wrong area, simply click elsewhere and the highlighting will disappear.

Use the cursor arrows to move around and the delete key to fix any typos you make.
Speaking of the delete key, if you wish to kill text rather than change it, simply strike the delete key after you've highlighted the offending section. Press the delete key with no text defined and it backspaces, deleting one letter at a time.

Whoops, what if you didn't mean to kill that  paragraph? "Command z" (or "undo typing" under the edit menu) will undo the last thing you did.

If the text is too long (or the headline is too big) for its box, a symbol will appear at the bottom of the box, a square with an X inside it. Trim the text to fit the box or make the point size of the head smaller (see the next section for how to do that).

  The X symbol
Note: The X-in-a-square symbol will also appear if there's a return mark at the end of the last paragraph (or last line of head) in the box. Check for this before you start slashing at text. Quark doesn't want return marks at the bottoms of boxes, so leave the last paragraph or line of head by its lonesome. (Can't see any paragraph marks at all? Drag down to "show invisibles" under the view menu.)

Remember to strike "command s" to save changes as you go, after every few steps.

The measurements palette
There's plenty to say about this handy palette, which allows you to resize a box and make all sorts of changes to the type or photo within a box, but we'll confine ourselves to its right-hand section.
 
The squares with lines inside them determine whether text is flush left, flush center, flush right or justified. (Highlight the text you wish to work with, and the current justification setting will be highlighted in the palette.) Beside those squares is displayed the name of the font being used. Holding down the mouse on the right-pointing arrow beside it offers you a pop-up menu to change the font.

Similarly, the point size is displayed (and changeable) beside the font. You can also change the point size and font by highlighting the current font name or point size and typing in the new one, instead of using the pop-up menus. Then strike return.

Beneath those two options are several boxes that affect type style, for example, P for plain, B for bold, I for italic, etc. Again, the current setting will be highlighted.

You probably won't need to use the measurements palette very much, but it's useful if you want to italicize a word or change the point size of a headline.

Example: To change the size of a head, first click in the box containing the headline. Make sure the content tool is highlighted, then highlight the headline. Go to the measurements palette, highlight the point size and change it to what you wish. Strike return. (Or click on the arrow beside the displayed point size, drag up or down to the size you want and release the mouse button.)

Save those changes!
Note: If no text or photo box is selected, the measurements palette will appear blank. (Sections of it may appear blank at other times, too. For example, if you highlight text that contains multiple point sizes or fonts, that section of the palette will appear blank.)

Editing graphics

Graphics are created in software programs such as Adobe Illustrator, Aldus Freehand, etc. They're not hard to navigate once you're used to Quark, but you will notice a few differences, along with similarities.

For example, Illustrator uses pull-down menus, a measurements palette and a tool box. There's a zoom tool as well, to make text bigger or smaller. But instead of using the tool box's grabber hand to edit text, you click on the capital T (for type). Then you simply highlight the text you wish to edit, or click within a word or phrase. (No need to highlight a text box first.)

Once you're comfortable using pull-down menus, the mouse and highlighting text, ask someone to spend 10 minutes or so showing you how to edit in your paper's graphics software. I doubt it will take any longer than that.

How to print 

To print out a proof of the page or graphic you've just edited, drag down to "print" under the file menu, or use the keyboard shortcut "command p."
A dialog box will appear, giving you several print options. (There are too many options to go into here, so ask for help the first time you want to print something. You might need to change the page setup first, for example, which is another option under the file menu.)
Look at the name of the printer  at the top of the dialog box and make sure it's the one you want. If it isn't, you'll have to change it, by dragging down to "chooser" under the apple menu.

A dialog box opens, offering your newsroom's printer options. Get someone to help you select the one you want. Then go back to "command p" and strike return or click on "print."

Let's go surfin' now
(everybody's learnin' how)

In every magazine you open these days, on many television commercials, you see it: "Visit our World Wide Web site at www.ournamehere.com." What does that mean, and what does it look like? And is the Internet just another way for retailers to sell us stuff?
Well, it is, but it's also a lot more than that. And it can be very useful for copy editing.
The Internet is a global network of more than 4 million computers that goes back to 1969, when four computers were first hooked up to communicate with one another. It has exploded since 1990, when it was opened to commercial use. In fact, Internet II is now in the works.

The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 and made available to the public in 1992 as a way to make the Internet easily accessible, without needing to know reams of coding.
The Web allows the Internet's computers to link to one another's documents, or pages, which may contain text, sound, graphics and even video.

A document may contain links to many other pages, which are accessed simply by clicking on hypertext, which is a word or phrase on a Web page that has the ability to take you to another document when you move your cursor onto it.

It's easy to click from link to link, page to page, as you see links that catch your interest. There's no beginning and no end to the Web; each document links to another and another like the delicate threads of a spider web.

This is a brand-new way of retrieving information, not like the libraries we're used to, with their rows of neatly indexed books.

The Web works tangentially, like the human brain, which seizes on one thought, then jumps sideways to another. So linear thinkers once again have some adjusting to do before they'll be comfortable surfing the Net.

To use the Web, you need a browser such as Netscape or Mosaic. Browsers are also available through the commercial on-line services, such as America Online, Compuserve and Prodigy.

What does a Web page look like?

A Web page resembles pictures and text on a TV screen. See the next page for an example:  This is what UNC's home page (the first Web document in a series of pages) looks like. Of course, the Web version is much more colorful.

Each of the lines spelling out CAROLINA is a hyperlink, which will take you to another page of information if you click on it. Same thing for the "Directories," "Search," "Comments" and "Help" buttons. (You know it's hypertext when your cursor turns into a pointing hand as you position it on the phrase.)

The "What's New?" "What's Cool?" "Net Search," etc., buttons at the top are not part of this particular page: They're features of Netscape Navigator, which is the Web browser I was using, that take you to other sites when you click on them.

The "Location" section right above that displays the Web address or URL (uniform resource locator) for the page you're on: in this case, http://www.unc.edu. You can highlight that address and type in a new one when you want to move to another site. Then strike return.

The "Back, "Forward," "Home," etc., buttons above the "Location" section are another Netscape feature, allowing you to move backward and forward among pages you've loaded, go to the home page default on your computer, find text on a page, stop a slow page from loading, and so on.

The Mac's menu bar is still useful when you're working with a Web browser. Take time to explore it and see what options it gives you. The most useful one I found is the "Go" menu, which will quickly take you back to any of the last several Web pages you've loaded.
Note: When you click on hypertext or type in a URL in the "Location" section, your computer calls the computer where that page is, and when that computer answers, your terminal downloads the page for you to view.

Once it has been loaded, it is cached by your computer and shows up in the "Go" menu until the cache cleans itself out to make room for new pages you want to load.
 
Anatomy of a Web address

What are all those letters and periods (actually called "dots") in a Web URL? Let's take a journalism course syllabus page at UNC as an example: http://www.unc.edu/courses/jomc050.

"Http" stands for hypertext transfer protocol. It's a standardized method of transferring data on the Internet. (On Netscape, you don't have to type in the "http." Netscape will assume that part of the address unless you tell it otherwise.) Other protocols that URLs might begin with are ftp, gopher, telnet.

After the protocol and the double slashes comes the host, in this case www.unc.edu (machine.institution.type of institution). After the single slash is the path, and after the next single slash is the file name. The file name often includes a tilde (~).

The abbreviations for types of institutions are as follows (though these are slated to change very soon):
.gov government (nonmilitary)
.mil military
.com commercial or corporate
.edu educational
.int international
.org other type of organization not covered above

Finding stuff on the Web: A warning

The World Wide Web can be very useful for copy editing because of the wealth of information it offers, with these caveats:

If you're not certain of the reliability of the information government Web sites are probably pretty dependable, but what about Joe Internaut's fan page on "The X-Files"? check it out somewhere else before using it.

And realize that the Web changes every day. What's here today might be gone (or completely different) tomorrow. This is one of the perils of such a democratic form of communication. Anyone with a Web browser can be a Web page author.
Search engines

Clicking on the Net Search button with Netscape Navigator takes you to a page offering a variety of search engines, such as Yahoo, Infoseek, WebCrawler, AltaVista, etc.
These engines let you search for topics, people or businesses simply by entering the name, subject or phrase you're looking for.

Your topic search may pull up thousands of entries, which will be offered to you 10 or 20 at a time. You needn't look through 1,000 listings, however; the best matches are offered first.

If you're searching for a particular phrase, such as "early 1960s rock music," it's best to put the phrase in quotes, or the engine might search for each of those four words rather than the entire phrase, giving you tons of info you don't want.
You can also use the search engines to check out the validity of the people or organizations behind Web pages.

Paul Gilster, Raleigh News & Observer computer columnist, wrote in the paper's April 8, 1997, edition that "learning to use the Net's own resources to validate or refute what you read is going to become an intellectual survival skill."

He suggests submitting iffy names or organizations associated with a Web page to one of the search engines, to find out what other people are saying about them.
Experiment with the various engines to see which you like the most. Yahoo and AltaVista both have their fans, for instance.

Mapquest (www.mapquest.com) gives directions and maps from one address to another. Big Book searches for businesses in a given city, by name or by type of business, and works with Mapquest to give you directions to the business.

Cool sites for copy editors

Here's a list of sites I found while Net surfing. It will give you an idea of how the Internet can be a resource for editors. I'm sure you'll find plenty more.

http://www.asne.org/asneindex.htm The home page for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Includes links to national journalism associations, job listings, on-line newspapers and journalism publications on the Web, in addition to news about ASNE.

http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/jpc/copy.html The University of Alaska-Anchorage journalism school's copy editing Web page. Has links to on-line dictionaries, Bartlett's Quotations, ZIP Code directories, gazetteers, etc., including Wired Style, a style book for computer terms from Wired magazine.

http://www.newsjobs.com The National Diversity Journalism Job Bank.

http://www.newslink.org American Journalism Review NewsLink. Lists top news sites on the Web, and the Web sites of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations. The resources page lists news services, journalism organizations, new-media newsletters and search tools.

http://www.reporter.org/beat A list of Web resources organized by beat, from IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors). Aimed at reporters, but also useful for us. Includes an Internet primer for newcomers.

http://www.copyeditor.com/Links.html The Web version of the newsletter called Copy Editor. Has job listings, discussions of editing questions, grammar and style notes, etc.

http://www.theslot.com A Web page for copy editors by a copy editor, Bill Walsh (formerly a slot man at the Washington Times, now a copy editor at The Washington Post). Amusing discussions of various style points. Be sure to sign the guest book!

http://www.li.net/~pambo: Editor's Ink contains surveys from copy editors at papers around the country about what it's like to work at those papers (useful for job hunters), and information on the fledgling American Copy Editors Society.

http://www.missouri.edu/~jschool/missourian/index.
html Columbia Missourian Web resources page. The copy desk page has links to Roget's Thesaurus and Webster's dictionary on the Web. There are also city desk and sports reference pages, and links to national and international on-line telephone directories.
http://www.plcmc.lib.nc.us/ The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, named Library of the Year in 1995 by Library Journal and Gale Research Inc. Has links to nearly 5,000 sites, from weather to the arts to humor to the sciences to sports.