Technology
Transcript
Susan Meyer: I’ll tell you it has gotten easier and easier! Back when I started, to get a graph, you had to draw it with a pen with your hand! You had to put lines on a piece of paper, and if it went blah, you had to throw it away and start over. I learned with difficulty, I have always done all my own graphics and drafting. When the computer graphics came along, when computer everything came along, it made my job about 1000 times easier. I learned by trial and error! You send something to a peer reviewed journal and if you didn’t get it right, they’ll tell you! They’ll say you’re going to have to do these over, the font is too small it won’t be readable when it is reduced…dadada, you learn by trial and error.
James Christensen: I hate computers but I love word processing and, I think back on the days when I did my master’s thesis and I wrote with carbon paper and typewriters and one mistake and you had to do the whole page again. Oh my gosh that was horrible! This is just… the technology for me is wonderful and I am getting so I can move things around and I can use the computer a lot. So I don’t really make hard copies until I am way down the road.
Claudia Laycock: Working on a computer has greatly improved my writing. I was an English major at BYU in the 70s, the early 70s and I did all my writing on a typewriter. And when I went to law school the new IBM pc was out and it was 5000 dollars and that would have taken my entire student loan for that year and so I went through law school on a typewriter. I am a much better writer because of computers. I am much more careful. I edit more carefully; if I write a paragraph I think that is brilliant but doesn’t fit write where I want it, I shift it back to the end of the document and save it for later and see if I can work it in. The computer, I think, has made us all better writers if we use it right. If I can kind of set up my outline and then fill it in as I go… I’ll bounce back and forth as I want to as I’m writing but I have a very planned format in mind.
Shanna Butler: I have written for Meridian magazine online and they’re only online and the church magazines are also online too, so I’ve written for both. And when I was here at the newspaper at the Daily Universe, it was you know Newsnet online, and so we did both video and print content for both web and print.
There used to be more of a difference than there is now. On the web we have to have more pieces, you have to have things you can link to, you have to have pictures, you have to have more versatile content so that it’s not just text on the screen. More and more magazines are going that way too. They’ll have little boxes on the page. They’ll have bits of information instead of having it all in one long article. I’m finding that more and more writing types are fusing.
Abe Mills: I really have to be slow and careful with the technology just because I am not a great typer and we tend to just spit-up everything—the first thing that we think, that comes out of our minds, and it just ends up on the email and then you gotta kind of sometimes go back and go ok, you know what am I really saying here?
I could [hand]-write a letter and have a lot less mistakes than if I typed up a five line email. It has a lot to do with reviewing, the grammar you use, the spelling, making sure that the point you got across was actually communicated—because ultimately writing is about communicating, so if you’re not getting the point across, then you’ve got to go back and make sure that that’s right.
Terry Olson: I do revising both on a computer and on a hard copy. Sometimes the hard copy allows me to go forward and back among paragraphs more quickly or somehow more effectively than being tied to a computer screen and the page that’s there and scrolling up and down. On the other hand, it’s nice on the later draft to be able to walk through a fairly finished product on the computer where you are doing tweaking and rearranging because then I can cut and paste. Most of the time, early drafts, hard copy, later drafts, yes I can use the computer.
Geoffrey Germane: The incorporation of visual aids into our work is something that takes a lot of resource in our business. Ultimately however, the report is based on what can be displayed visually—graphs and charts and things like that. Ultimately I end up presenting the contents of my report, often in a deposition, say an oral discussion with an attorney, I will present what’s in the report not only through words but also through exhibits, like charts and graphs and diagrams. We also use those very same charts and graphs in trial; if the matter gets to the courtroom then we will adapt those diagrams upon which the report is based to exhibits to show the jury to help explain what we wrote in the report.
The displays—the visual displays—involve electronics, which might be a video, an animation, a video tape of a crash test we do. Also, it might be a series of photographs mounted on a board, or a diagram that is mounted on a large foam core board that becomes something that we could move around in the courtroom and use for illustrative or demonstrative purposes.