Tools: Text - ENG 260 Business And Professional Writing: Fall 2009

a simple plain text file that has characters (letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation) from a character set such as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and Unicode.

You can think of the .txt version as the "natural" state of a document, the "naked" document without clothes. The clothing styles are all the versions in which organizations dress their information, some more formal, some more colorful, all hopefully adapted to readers' and collaborators' many needs.

Text files are files where most bytes (or short sequences of bytes) represent ordinary readable characters such as letters, digits, and punctuation (including spaces), and include some control characters such as tabs, line feeds and carriage returns.

how is it commonly used?

for email, online forms, resumes, and databases, including wikis and other database-driven templated document management systems, which means it is by far the most common document format in today's computer-networked, digital-media-saturated organizations.

managing unformatted text

deformatting proprietary text ("washing")

scanning text

SWOT

strengths/weaknesses

The essence of a text editor is simplicity. It doesn't have many features on purpose.

provides freedom from being dependent on certain programs (with some trade-offs, sacrifices and limitations)

simplicity maximizes the ability of other applications, especially content management systems

unavailable with ASCII text:

bolds
underlines
italics
tabbed indents
forced page breaks
multiple fonts
graphics

software

text editor: NoteTab Light (recommended), PSPad (portable app for your USB), Notepad (bundled in Windows), Text Edit (Mac OS)

You'll find Notepad in the Start | Programs | Accessories menu. Right-click and select Create Shortcut. Then drag the shortcut to your desktop, where it will always be visible. To keep your desktop more tidy, you could drag the shortcut icon to your taskbar and then delete it from your desktop.

Notepad is very functional and very basic. It will serve you well. However, I use Fookes Software's free version of NoteTab Light every day, and I recommend it to you as an alternative to Notepad. For your portable apps, use PSPad. They have a lot of nifty click-saving features.

style sheet

A style sheet lists and gives examples of your choices for the limited formatting options available with ascii text. This style sheet would be a separate file that would let others produce a similar-looking document. On the right is a screen shot of what your .txt report might look like.

background

graphs/charts, boxes, images

text, headings

line width -- 65 characters, use a hard return instead of unpredictable word wrap

hyphens - use in words that normally contain them but do not hyphenate words across lines.

special characters - such as mathematical symbols, not accurately transferred in the text save - avoid them

alignment - the default is left justified -- to indent a sentence or center a heading, use the spacebar.

tabs - not recognized - use the spacebar sparingly

fonts - ASCII text recognizes only the most commonly accepted fonts such as Courier, Arial and Times New Roman, so use a fixed-width font

lists

tables

use fixed-width, non-proportional fonts recognizing that your reader may view the document with proportional fonts that will throw the columns off a straight vertical line

Uses of Text Files

Email has been used for almost forty years as ASCII text. For the last ten years, email clients (email software) have also been able to interpret and display email coded with HTML to add features like bold-facing and color not available with ASCII-email. Sometimes it's hard to tell because the HTML-email is made to look like ASCII-email by using the default style and nothing special.

The first thing way that you communicate your report to me will be via email. Not as an email attachment, but pasted right into the email message body. First, send it to yourself to see how it looks. After you're happy with it, email it to me.

Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) helps organizations manage work flow in a collaborative environment that uses a variety of data: documents, still and moving images, sound, phone numbers, scientific data, etc.

The most used CMS in the world is a commerical application that you may have heard of: Facebook. You are increasingly likely to work for an organization in which you spend most of your workday on the company's network.

many employees can contribute to and share stored data and information with less friction

users and groups of users -- inside and outside the organization -- can be assigned levels of permission to control access along a dynamic continuum from no access to read-only access, to read and write (edit), to read/write/execute

employees can concentrate on content, on structuring information, and less on the presentation, structuring, filing, and storing of documents

data is all bits and all bits are the same, so the data (unstructured information) can be efficiently managed (as opposed to the analog world of paper, file cabinets, etc.): captured, stored, analyzed, preserved, searched, and delivered.

Digital asset management (DAM) consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. Digital photographs, animations, videos and music exemplify the target-areas of media asset management (a sub-category of DAM).

Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizations as processes or practices.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

When you go for a job interview, part of the discussion will be about your familiarity with the company's CMS. The sophistication of your response can make or break your chances of getting the job.

Forms

A form is very common online. They look like the one below (which doesn't work, so don't try to send it.)

If this one worked, when you click that Send to Doug (or "Submit") button, either or both of two things can happen. The information you entered into the form can get sent to someone as email or it can get stored in a database for later (or immediate) retrieval and display. In both cases, an ASCII text file is what gets sent. Every form you fill out online is the same, whether a Google search box or an airplane schedule query at Expedia.com or Orbitz.com.

The information submitted via a form is commonly added to a template of HTML (for structure) and CSS (for style/presentation) and displayed on a Web page. The software that makes this happen is called a content management system. In addition to IM (instant messaging) and phone texting, which are the most common forms-and-templates-based content management systems, three others are increasingly used in professional business environments:

Discussion Forums

Also known as message boards or bulletin boards, or what the Wikipedia calls Internet forums, discussion forums are good for letting many users ask questions and letting many people answer.

Forums allow anonymous visitors to view the contents and consist of a group of contributors who've registered into the system, becoming known as members. The members submit topics for discussion (known as threads) and communicate with each other using publicly visible messages (referred to as posts) or private messaging.

As you will see when you visit Eng260F11 Forum, our course discussion forum at Make Forum, the reply box where you enter your message is just another web form. The information that you enter is stored in a simple database (aka "flat file") and then retrieved and displayed with a script that applies an HTML template for structure and CSS style sheet for presentation.

For purposes of this course, post your report's title page information, summary (or abstract), and a link to the .txt file on your personal web space on our course web. http://toLearn.net/eng260/f11/yourlastname/yourfilename.txt

Blogs

Blogs are great for one-to-many communication, such as one person writing about personal finance. They are organized on the home page chronologically by message. Most messages are tagged (assigned one or more topics), and the messages can be grouped chronologically by message within a topic. Individual messages can be viewed separately, that is, on their own web page. They can often have comments added by (usually registered) users.

We are going to use Blogger. Each of you will create an account and start your own blog so that you can publish your repor pb works logo

t on it. For purposes of this course, post your report's title page information, summary (or abstract), and the text.

You will note that, just like a discussion forum, a blog uses a form for you to submit content. Just like a forum, it uses a database and template to store and format what the readers see in their browsers.

If you have your own gmail or Google account, you can use that name and password for Blogger, which Google bought in 2004, when it was already 5 years old.

The Wikipedia has a short but very informative article on blogs, their history and uses.

Wikis

Wikis are excellent for collaboration. They let registered users collaborate, add files, suggest links, and create a document that's comprehensive and up-to-date. It also records a history of its revisions. These various versions are stored, can be searched, can be compared side by side with any other version, and can be rolled back to. It is via this versioning and roll-back system that Wikipedia is able to maintain its integrity. This system lets the good drive out the bad.

As of fall 2011, these seem to be the most popular free wiki spaces Wetpaint, PBworks, and Wikispaces.

For purposes of this course, we are going to use a wiki that I use for another course, HUM 300 The Arts in Society. Your username and password will be those of previous students of that course, available on our reports page. There are many wiki systems I could have chosen to install on my server. I chose TikiWiki, and it does what I want it to do.

Content Management Frameworks

Until recently, web developers used a home brew content management system, and many of them still do. The tools were a text editor and an image editor, a browser, an FTP client, and a server to upload to. It was integrated on the developer's PC or laptop, and he or she provided most of the skills by hand. WISYWIG web page formatting programs like Microsoft's FrontPage and Adobe's Dreamweaver and the open source KompoZer made formatting documents "just like using Word" as the ads would proclaim.

The increasing use of databases by developers and increasing use of the Web by the late majority and laggard adopters brought a gradual change. Instead of the professionals structuring documents one-by-one, they are now asked only to create the content and the system will do the rest.

We now have what are called content management frameworks (CMF). These are application programming interfaces (API - rules and specifications that software programs can follow to communicate with each other) so that the IT department can create a customized content management system (CMS).

The current (2011) hot CMF is Drupal. By hot, I mean that it is used for sites as varied as WhiteHouse.gov and Medaille.edu. Each new member of the U.S. House of Representatives is given a Drupal site, including the newly elected Kathy Hochul from New York's 26th District -- everything between Buffalo and Rochester.

my Drupal web in Acquia's Dev Cloud - with Dev Cloud and Skype, I can develop websites from anywhere for customers who are anywhere. This internationalization of content and product development in IT is found in almost every industry that either manages information or uses information. That is, all industries, including the one you will be working for.

Acquia and others have distributions of Drupal, that is, versions customized for general applications and industries from recruiting to churches. One that a lot of companies are using now is Open Atrium.

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

The Tools: Text

ENG 260 Business And Professional Writing

Medaille College - Fall 2011

Document specifications

ASCII text report

what is it?