Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

TechnoZen

Speed up your writing

The longer the document you need to write, the slimmer the chance of getting it right on the first draft. So don’t agonize over every word when you first write a document. Instead, dash through the first draft and, wherever you’re not sure about something, leave a

Read more

Creating image captions

Need to explain images you put in your document? You can do so in the surrounding text, and you can also create text that’s clearly associated with the images using captions.

Read more

Resizing images

Look at what happened when I dragged a photo from a web page into a Word document. (This photo was taken from a Toronto Star article dated September 20, 2011.) Word’s Normal style kept the image properly left-aligned, but the image went well beyond the right boundary

Read more

Inserting images

The cliché bears repeating: a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why you find graphs in financial reports and photos in memoirs, among many other uses. You can easily bring photos, graphs, scanned drawings and other graphical information into a Word document. The key is to

Read more

Concord Park Place: Discovery

Concord Adex Development Corporation builds not just buildings but entire master-planned communities. One such community in northern Toronto is now bearing its first fruits; Concord Park Place Discovery has welcomed its first residents.

Read more

Word TOC shortcoming

I contributed to an anthology of work by 18 Canadian writers called Prose To Go: Tales From A Private List (a fine read, if I do say so myself. Pick it up if you get the chance.) I contributed not just an essay but I also set

Read more

E-trials in Canada: Bringing the courtroom into the future

To prepare for Mishkeegogamang v. Canada et al. and Slate Falls v. Canada et al. (two actions merged into one), attorneys for two plaintiffs and three defendants would need seven copies of more than 4,000 documents. Yet instead of hundreds of bankers boxes crowding the courtroom, I

Read more

Creating fields

In my work as a copywriter and journalist, I use a Word template that provides important information about the document I’m writing – word count, document name, current section of document (according to heading style) and so forth. Word automatically fills in most of this information since,

Read more

Kramer Design Associates

Toronto street furniture, of all things, has taken an exciting turn for the modern. New-look metal-and-wood benches, eye-catching glass transit shelters sporting cantilevered roofs and combination trash and recycling bins sporting pedal-operated lids add practical design flourishes to the town. These street-level touches of elegance are the

Read more

Is your document readable?

When you prepare a document using Microsoft Word, you’re actually doing two things: writing content formatting the content Word offers many tools people can use to automate the formatting of their Word documents, thus saving them lots of time. But Word cannot help people who have not

Read more