Read a Good Word Processing Book Lately?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a computer lab assistant at a small state college, and as such I help students with their MS Office coursework. This coursework is designed to make them operable in the open market, and help familiarize them with the word processing / spreadsheet environment. Unfortunately, it gives them a one sided perspective from a Microsoft standpoint, and the text is very unclear on the assignments. Are there any suite-independent, clear textbooks on word processing available out there?"

Comments

Absolutely Not

[fm6]

Word processing as such is not that hard. There are few general concepts that are application independent (what's a document? what's formatting? what's a style?), but you can learn those in maybe 30 minutes. Most of the training people need for a particular word processor is coaching in how to cope with its idiosyncracies and design flaws.

In any case, you don't learn to use a word processor by reading a book. You learn by writing documents. A good text supports this activity, and thus has to refer to a specific WP.

If you really want your students to be vendor-agnostic you should train them to do similar tasks on a variety of word processors. But I suspect that your students will rebel at this approach. They'll want skills that look good on a resume. And what looks good on a resume is experience with specific apps, not generalized skills.

That's not a good thing, of course. It means that well-entrenched but badly-designed apps like Word and FrameMaker will continue to dominate. And it also means that employers will tend to prefer rote learners for jobs that probably require a degree of adapability and creativity. But you're not going to change these things just by insisting that your students learn WPs they'll never get a chance to use.

Teach them design

[90XDoubleSide]

Any book that is technical in nature and is simply teching you how to use a suite is obviously going to be applicable to only one program, but if you give them a book about what to do with it, they will gain knowledge that can be used in any environment, and which will probably help them out more in the long term than learning what every menu command in suite x does. I highly recommend Robin Williams's classic The Mac Is Not a Typewriter: A Style Manual for Creating Professional-Level Type on Your Personal Computer . The revised editon will be available this spring, and The PC Is Not a Typewriter is available now.