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Moving Beyond Embarrassment

Let’s face it, being a shy writer doesn’t work that well these days with the world of Twitter, Face Book, and blogs. I’m more exposed as a writer than any other job that I’ve had. Different versions of me (aging me) over the past six years are documented on my blog. My kids’ pictures are there. My husband might still be spared from a public appearance. When moms that I see every day at school pick-up and drop-off tell me that they read my 

About Me

 page, I turn bright red.

I’m putting myself out there, yet I’m embarrassed by it. I write about parts of my personal life that I would only tell a close friend, but I blurt it out to the world. And then, I’m surprised when someone who I haven’t “told” begins to talk to me about it. It’s like owning a business but my face, heart, and soul are the business and to succeed I have to promote myself. I write what matters to me and sometimes that leaves me feeling a little vulnerable. These days a writer has to have some guts. Having a blog or website to quickly point to in a submission email to an editor is important and required.

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The Art of Merging

Ice Cream Cake

As I write this technical blog post, I can’t help but think back to my days working as a technical writer. After some unfortunate childcare situations, which I write about in my upcoming book “First Do No Harm: A Memoir,” I decided to stay home and take care of the kids full-time. Now I’m still writing but it’s creative.

So when I merged all the edits from Elizabeth Stark’s workshop class into my original document, I couldn’t help but want to pass on the technique. I’ve known about merge documents for a long time. I’ve even used it before for work, but it had been a while and I was a little scared of messing up my document or getting bogged down in some buggy Word feature. I was elated by how easy it was, useful, and by how much time it has saved me!

Every week in workshop class, a writer submits their 5K piece and the rest of the group has a week to comment on it. There’s line edits, readers comments, questions, and a brief statement at the end. To make comments, each reader uses Word, clicks on the Review tab, Turns on Track Changes, and begins reading. Some people prefer to write all their comments in the text of the document with Track Changes On and some like to use Comments that appear in the right-hand column.

Here’s the tricky part, when I get three or four replicas of my piece back at the end of the week, it’s a lot of toggling between documents. And I get lost on what comments I’ve done and haven’t done. Not to mention how hard it is to open all four Word documents, get everything organized only to be distracted and have to start again reorienting myself. There’s too much start up time and I don’t have that kind of time. 

Merging all the documents into one solved all these problems

. Here’s how I did it:

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