Carpenter Document Consulting

I regularly receive frantic emails from clients who are frustrated because they can’t figure out how to create a Table of Contents in Word. If they did create a TOC, they don’t know how to update the page numbers or content. Or, text and images are appearing in the TOC that shouldn’t be there.

That’s where Carpenter Doc can help! We’re very experienced in creating TOCs with many heading levels, and we can format your TOC to meet your school- or publisher-specific formatting guidelines. Building an effective Table of Contents starts with establishing heading styles in your document as you write. If you aren’t sure how to do that, leave it to us. We can create and apply heading levels throughout your document and then build the TOC from there.

When you get your document back, you’ll notice that the TOC is highlighted gray. That’s because you can automatically update it. Simply right-click within the TOC and choose “Update field” to update the page numbers, content, or both. Forget about manually entering all of your page numbers — those will inevitably change as you revise, anyway. A Carpenter-Doc-created TOC is the easiest way to build the frontmatter for your document.

Carpenter Doc relies on email to communicate with clients, whether we’re offering a quote or sending and receiving documents. In some cases, however, documents are simply too large to send via email. In those instances, we can accommodate our clients with whatever online document-sharing program they use, whether it’s Google Docs, YouSendIt, or SugarSync. However, we’ve found Dropbox to be a great way to collaborate with clients on documents. With Dropbox, we can create a shared folder with a client and place their documents in that folder, making them accessible for both the editor and writer.

If you’re sending us work soon, think about using Dropbox. Waiting for large documents to attach to an email can be a hassle. Dropbox allows you to share your information more efficiently. If you have any questions about using Dropbox, shoot Barbie an email: barbie@carpenterdoc.com.

Though the bulk of our freelance workload comes from clients needing an editor, Carpenter Document Consulting offers freelance writing services as well. My academic background is in writing, with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a graduate certificate in professional writing. In recent years, I have started working with a number of online clients to produce web-specific content. My work can be found on eHow, LIVESTRONG, The Houston Chronicle, AOL/The Huffington Post/MapQuest, and Hidden Valley. I continue to pursue freelance writing work and can develop a variety of content for private clients, including the following:

• Informational articles. Want to add some interesting content to your website? Let me write it for you. I can research the topic and produce a high-quality article for your site.
• Website text. Not sure how to handle that “About” page on your website? Send me your credentials, and I will write your website text. Your website is the first impression that potential clients and customers have of your business, so it is important that your text is professional, well-written, and easy to comprehend.
• Blog posts. Do you have a blog for your business? I can create posts for your blog that will increase traffic and expand your reach on the web.
• Marketing collateral. Are you creating a brochure, for example, for your business? Let me write the text for you!
• Job search documents. Have a resume that needs updating or a cover letter that needs to fit a specific job? I can help.
• Social media content. Do you have a Facebook page or Twitter feed for your business but you aren’t sure how to use it? I can manage the site to maximize its effectiveness.

Note that we do not write academic papers. Most of our editing work comes from students, but I do not write papers for them. I enjoy editing academic papers for grammar, spelling, punctuation, flow, consistency, cohesion, and style, but I do not rewrite content. I will make suggestions if a sentence is structured awkwardly or is difficult to follow, but I leave the content to the expert: the student.

Stay tuned for some writing samples in an upcoming blog post!

When you’re writing a lengthy document like a thesis or dissertation, keeping track of your references can be challenging. Every source you cite needs to have a detailed entry on your List of References. In addition to providing the author(s), year of publication, title, publisher, and more, you have to ensure your references follow your style guide.

That’s where we come in. When we edit your document, we check every in-text citation against the references to verify the following:

• Consistent spelling of author names and titles
• Correct year
• Valid entry in references

More often than not, we discover that a client unintentionally left off a few references, which is no surprise since such lengthy academic documents include dozens, if not hundreds, of sources.

Checking your references one by one is a tedious process. So, let us do it for you. This service is part of any comprehensive edit, but we can check your references as a separate service as well. Contact us today!

As mentioned in my previous post, I’m doing some freelance writing work with AOL and MapQuest. Up next in MapQuest’s holiday series is TurkeyQuest, a guide to all things Thanksgiving. These articles are fun to write and hopefully useful for readers looking for some holiday festivities. Check out some of my TurkeyQuest articles, linked below.

Thanksgiving in Chicago

Thanksgiving in Florida

Thanksgiving in Miami

Thanksgiving in Orlando

Finally, we’d like to wish our clients a very Happy Thanksgiving! This year, we are especially thankful for you!

You send us a clean copy of your document … but you don’t get one in return. Don’t let the comments and red marks intimidate you. Word’s reviewing tools help keep track of every change, allowing you to learn about your common grammatical errors and, every now and then, override our changes.

Here’s how to approach revising that edited document:

Scan through the tracked changes within the text of the document. Typically, these are minor, easily fixable errors, such as misplaced or missing punctuation, misspelled words, incorrect style, or poor word choice. You can accept or reject changes as a whole or individually. Here’s how:

1. Select the Review tab in Word.
2. Select the “Accept” or “Reject” button on the Changes tab.
3. Choose “Accept or Reject and Move to Next” to address changes individually.
4. Choose “Accept All Changes in Document” to make wholesale changes.

You’ll immediately have a cleaner document once you eliminate those tracked changes. Next, tackle the comments. Comments are items that we did not fix for you because a) we need more information to do so, b) we have suggestions for how to revise, or c) they pertain to content, which requires your input. If you can address the comment without our help, make the change in the text. Then, right-click the comment and select “Delete Comment.” If, on the other hand, you need our help, you can type a response in the comment box and send the document back to us.

When all of your tracked changes are accepted and comments are addressed and deleted, you’ll be left with that clean copy that you sent us.

Here at Carpenter Doc, we rely on email to communicate with our clients. They send us their documents; we edit them; we send them back. While working in an application like Google Docs would be helpful and eliminate those pesky emails, it’s not realistic for us — yet. Google Docs now features a comment stream, allowing for a more collaborative writing process. We still rely on Word’s trusty reviewing tools for an efficient and effective edit, but here’s hoping that Google continues to roll out more collaboration tools. Maybe someday, we can edit in the “cloud.”

Including long quotations in your paper from a credible source can add richness to the piece and deepen your readers’ understanding of the concept. However, you might not know how to format the quotation. Thankfully, APA and MLA offer guidance on this subject:

• APA: If your quote exceeds 40 words, set it off as a freestanding block quote. Indent the entire quote .5 inches on the left, and keep the right ragged. Do not use quotation marks, and include the parenthetical citation outside of the end punctuation. Place the author’s name, year of publication, and page number(s) in parenthesis, separated by commas.

• MLA: If your quote exceeds four lines of text, use a block quote. MLA uses the same block quote format as APA. However, keep in mind that the parenthetical citation in MLA is different. Include the author’s last name and page number with no punctuation.

If you introduce the block quote with the author’s name, then you do not have to include the last name in the parenthetical citation. Both APA and MLA follow this rule.

While I’m enjoying my quasi-hiatus from editing, I thought I’d share some websites that I have bookmarked and access regularly, if not daily. They are great resources for writing, grammar, and style tips. Enjoy!

• Chicago Manual of Style FAQs
• AP Stylebook Online (This requires a  subscription, but if you use AP Style regularly, it is well worth the $25 annual fee.)
• Grammar Girl
• Purdue OWL
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary
• APA Style Blog

As some of you know, one of my ongoing freelance assignments is writing and editing for Demand Media Studios, which produces websites like eHow. I thought I’d share a few of my recent eHow articles that are particularly relevant for my Carpenter Doc clients. Enjoy!

• How to Publish a Novella
• How to Change an Essay
• How to Develop a Working Outline for a Speech
• How to Write a Good Nursing Paper

Happy Memorial Day!