Re: The References Group: please help me with some problems

I think the Kaypro was a predecessor of the Compaq. One of the people I sort
of worked with (the daughter of one of my clients, who actually wrote some
of the instructor's manuals and "student study guides" I typed) had a Kaypro
originally.

There are a lot of WordStar alums, many of whom remain nostalgic about WS's
navigation keys (there were lots of add-ins and macros that emulated them).
You can find "A Potted History of WordStar" at
http://www.wordstar.org/wordstar/history/history.htm. The last version I had
was an ill-conceived Windows adaptation.

I didn't think WordPerfect transitioned to Windows very gracefully, either.
As many WP features as one can be nostalgic about (and I'll admit there are
some I still miss), I found Word so much more intuitive (for me) that I took
to it immediately. One of my clients hung on for a very long time (actually,
I think he still uses it, as does my husband for some things); I finally
tore him away by giving him a copy of whatever version of Word/Office I was
currently using it (and the fact that publishers started preferring Word to
WP didn't hurt). When I got a Windows 2000 machine and my last version of WP
wouldn't install on it, that was the end for me (though I still have WP
files on my HD that I can open in Word).

The course I took at Georgetown was one of two offered by Richard J.
O'Brien, S.J., and Neil J. Twombley, S.J., the authors of the Georgetown
University Latin Series (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1963), which
applied a sort of Audio Lingual Method to Latin. The more pedagogical of the
two classes was intended to count as an "education" course toward my
teaching certificate. Although I'd always intended to teach Latin, I hadn't
taken education courses in college because the teacher certification program
required a quarter of practice teaching in one's senior year (precluding any
other coursework that quarter), and Miss Zenn had said she would not direct
an independent study for less than three quarters. This choice was a
no-brainer for me; I opted for the independent study. I was advised that one
could take education courses cheaply anywhere, and in fact I did later get
most of them at Georgia State University, but I started with these summer
classes at Georgetown. As a result, I ended up using the O'Brien/Twombley
method in my first year of teaching (entirely without the blessing of anyone
in the school or school system). But of course the linguistics class was
lagniappe for me.

I taught Latin for four years, then went to Emory University and got a
master's. After that my life took a different direction (motherhood, among
other things), and I've been typing/editing/word processing/typesetting for
the past 33 years. Your curent project sounds fascinating, though I'm not
sure my attention span would stretch to three volumes!

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"grammatim" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8d0d5b52-4e0c-445b-8b68-93cf0e33d75e@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This is fun! (I wonder if anyone else is looking.) Your Compaq sounds
just like my Kaypro, which, however, has a metal case. It came with
PerfectWriter -- there are one or two things that PerfectWriter, using
64 K (not 640 K) RAM, could do that no modern word processor can --
and WordStar (or maybe WordStar came with my first DOS machine, which
was more the size of a small briefcase and had those newfangled 3.5"
diskettes). (What ever happened to WordStar? It was much better than
WordPerfect.)

Georgetown was, and still is, an excellent place for linguistics; plus
it has the largest school of languages anywhere.

Sounds like you're the perfect audience for my current editing
project, which is Phil Baldi's three-volume historical syntax of Latin
(well, some of the contributors failed to contribute, so now it's
"perspectives on" Latin historical syntax -- tho I don't know the
names of the chapters that didn't come in.)

On Apr 12, 2:21 pm, "Suzanne S. Barnhill" <sbarnh...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
BTW, I would not want to misrepresent myself as a linguist in the sense
being an expert in linguistics (at one time I was more of a linguist in
the
sense of one who has command of more than one language). Aside from my
independent study, I've had only one linguistics course (at Georgetown
University in the summer of 1966 after graduating from Agnes Scott
College).
But because I had essentially a second major in French, and because my
independent study director (Dr. Elizabeth G. Zenn) *was* a linguist, she
suggested that I do something that combined Latin and French, viz., the
transition from Vulgar Latin to Old French.

"To do this [according to my Foreword] I first spent seven weeks reading
Vulgar Latin texts beginning with Petronius and the Latin inscriptions and
continuing through texts as late as the seventh century, with emphasis on
those from Gallic areas. I then spent eleven additional weeks reading
nine-twelfth century Old French texts and several Provençal selections."

The remainder of the year was devoted to a detailed study of the first 50
verses of the "Lai du Chievrefeuille" of Marie de France (as much as I
could
cover in the time I had) "in an attempt to bring all that I had learned to
bear on one piece of writing and demonstrate it in a written exercise.
I...tried to be as clear and complete as possible within the boundaries of
limited time and knowledge, and to increase the clarity of the paper with
indices, a set of phonological charts, and generous cross-references."

The entire opus is only 34 pages long (including a page of abbreviations
and
one of sigla, an Index of Words Discussed and an Index to the Commentary).
I
could easily reproduce it in a few hours (and I think at one time I
actually
did at least a small sample). At the time, though, it was many days (or
nights) of labor just to type, quite aside from the study that went into
it.
The "phonological charts," by the way, are entirely hand-drawn. <g>

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"grammatim" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:b244c172-dabf-44f5-8ab0-9b81b77b3696@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Linguist and Classicist! Kewl! The elsementioned Director of the O.I.
later on had a handsome wooden case with about a dozen Selectric balls
for such exotic scripts as Greek, Russian, Hebrew -- and Arabic. (The
Arabic font was a brilliant piece of design, managing to squeeze
everything needed into just the 80 or so slots available; you can see
it in lots of teaching materials published in the 1970s such as the
Michigan series of textbooks.) He let everyone borrow them. One
shudders to think what would have happened if one had gotten broken.

In the early 70s I edited the members' newsletter (being in the
Director's office), and it was typeset on an IBM machine about the
size of a sideboard that could produce a page at a time, two columns,
proportinally spaced, justified, in various sizes. In the summer of
1981 a friend who worked at IBM took me to see an immense machine
called a "word processor" -- it took up a wall of a room, with a small
monitor over a keyboard in the middle -- which, with the input of lots
of codes, would produce serviceable output _that could be edited
inside the machine_. (My first computer was a Kaypro 4/84 -- I got it
like a month before Apple introduced its academic-user program, but
the Kaypro was more sophisticated than those earliest Apples, which
had something like a 32 K limit on file size.) And from 1987 I was
typesetter for an advertising company using a VariTyper 6400; then
there was a fire, and ca. 1990 it was replaced with a Macintosh and
this brand-new thing called "QuarkXpress." (I got to go to the
Consumer Electronics Show at McCormick Place to evaluate the competing
products. Met the guy who invented Tetris.)

The publisher of my first book, meanwhile, was also working in Mac (PC
wasn't an option for desktop publishing at the time), and he
introduced me to FrameMaker (v.3) when I began work on *The World's
Writing Systems* (Oxford UP paid for the whole suite of hardware and
software), when at the same time I had to learn Fontographer, too! His
business is becoming a Mac museum because there's no OS X version of
FrameMaker (Adobe is not supporting it, having bought it to eliminate
competition for InDesign, which has far fewer book-building
capabilities) and newer Macs don't run OS 9.

(I'm now on PC because the job I had put the computer in my house;
since Frame isn't Unicode-aware, I can't stay with it.)

On Apr 12, 10:53 am, "Suzanne S. Barnhill" <sbarnh...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:



Computers make many tasks far easier and others more difficult. My
college
independent study paper, typed on a manual typewriter, required many
characters (even some as basic as square brackets) to be inserted by
hand;
since the subject was linguistics, there were actually *many* hand
insertions. My master's thesis (in Classics) was typed on an IBM
Selectric
using three type balls: Prestige Elite, plus italic and Greek balls. At
least both of those papers permitted endnotes, but I typed many a
student
paper with footnotes that had to be carefully estimated and allowed for;
if
I miscalculated, an entire page had to be retyped.

Some of the worst jobs I ever did were (a) a finance dissertation, with
many
formulas that had to be painfully built up with many half-line platen
rolls,
and (b) a business dissertation for a university that required "two
originals" (I don't know what they were thinking!). In the latter case,
even
using a memory typewriter (IBM Wheelwriter), the task of producing two
originals was excruciating; I had to type into memory until the end of a
page coincided with the end of a paragraph, then replay to get another
copy,
then start on the next chunk. In another case, producing "camera-ready
copy"
for an instructor's manual, I created boxed text (think of a paragraph
border in Word) with underlines and a vertical line character. Looking
back
on these jobs and thinking what a breeze they would have been on the
computer, I see how much more productive I could (theoretically) have
been
with a computer.

And of course that's without even mentioning the drudgery of typing
draft
after draft for one's thesis supervisor, each one from scratch (and
inevitably introducing new errors).

OTOH, there are times when one does long for the simplicity of just
rolling
the platen to a specific vertical location, tabbing or spacing to a
specific
horizontal location, and typing in place (and no, I don't accept "click
and
type" as a substitute, although it amounts to the same thing). And of
course
when one is doing everything "by hand," one has complete control over
formatting. Not to mention that typing is not nearly as exhausting as
keyboarding. As much as I resented having to pull one *** of paper out
of
the typewriter and insert another one (especially when I was composing
at
the typewriter and feared I'd lose my train of thought), that did
provide
respite from typing and use a different set of muscles. On a computer,
typing on a single long page, there is never a need to stop, and I so
seldom
do straight typing any more that I find it especially wearying when I
have
to.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

"grammatim" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:97c4612d-24ce-4e8d-aeef-0d3cf952e39b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I checked out StyleEase after Aliera2's posting a couple of weeks ago,
and it's clear from the documentation (Chicago version) that it can't
be used by a serious scholar. The first drawback is that it simply
doesn't allow you to have both in-text parenthesized references and
references in footnotes in the same document. The second is that no
scholar will ever have to prepare papers in only one (of just four
available!) formats, and the cost of the four (uncustomizable!)
different applications goes a long way toward the purchase price of
EndNote. (And it doesn't seem to have provisions for such arcane but
essential additions as both editors and translators of a single work.)
The most sophisticated such program I've encountered was Papyrus, a
Mac-only app whose developer gave it up when he realized that adapting
it to OS X would be an overwhelming task. (It probably doesn't have
the web-search abilities of the more recent generations of such
tools.)

Incidentally, "Turabian" and "Chicago" are not the same. "Turabian" is
for unpublished work, from the weekly essay through the term paper to
the M.A. thesis and the Ph.D. dissertation; "Chicago," which is based
on it, is for published work. Mrs. Turabian (who had retired by the
time I became involved with the University of Chicago Press ca. 1975)
was the Press's Chief Manuscript Editor; she _may_ also, or at one
time, have been the University's Dissertation Secretary, a single
person whose responsibility was to see that every dissertation
submitted in every department of the university adhered to the
specified format. (There were typists who made a good living typing
dissertations for Ph.D. candidates who were thus relieved of the
necessity of mastering the arcana.) During my whole 25 years in
Chicago, the Dissertation Secretary was Geoffrey Plampin, a delightful
gentleman whom I knew from his many, many theatrical appearances (for
instance, as the Butler in *The Importance of Being Earnest*; we were
in *Ionlanthe* together in 1973).

Alas I fear that in the day of electronic manuscript preparation, the
notion of perfectly uniform style may have gone by the wayside, just
as the University of Chicago Press itself now states in the Manual
that a manuscript that has been prepared with perfect consistency
using _some other style_


.

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