The Writers Workbench

This is a borderline "Oops."  Yesterday, I posted a article ruminating about long articles, which came about as the result of getting an upset email from a reader who came across my Writers Workbench article that had been posted on the Writers Guild Online.  

Where it hadn't been posted yet is here.

That's somewhat understandable, though still I probably should have posted it here first -- though the point of the article yesterday was not dependent on seeing the tech column.  What happened is that, as I note each month, it's too convoluted to reformat my tech column, The Writers Workbench, for these pages, so instead I link to its posting elsewhere.  I'd already posted it on the WGA site, and someone read it there before I'd gotten around to writing about it here.  And I addressed the issue of Really Long Articles first.

So, for thems what are interested in such things, here's the article that prompted the ruminations.

This month, I have a very long column about Windows 8 and Office.  And as you might have guessed at this point, when I say "very long," I don't mean adorably so, I mean "What in God's name is he thinking???!" long. 

It's not for everyone.  But I've tried to make it as non-techie as possible (which is one of the reason it's so long), and also it's a dense topic to address properly.  The focus of the column is behind the reason why it's as non-techie as possible -- it looks at Windows 8 from the perspective of those who have put off upgrading so far, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is abject fear.  And so, I run through the process as (hopefully...) clearly and "hand-holdingly" as possible.  I also break the Very Long Article into a lot of sections, so if you're only interested in one part of it, you can jump there directly and read only that.

The short version of the Very Long Article is that Windows 8.1 is actually what the program is now, and that one decimal point makes a huge difference -- somewhat similar to how Windows 3 is forgotten, but Windows 3.1 changed the computing world.  And while Windows 8 was very good but problematic, Windows 8.1 is extremely good and the more you get it working with other programs (as it's intended), it's coming across even better. 

You can find it here.