h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

serious and funny mixed together then cooked to perfection!

Thanks.

Glad we have a fan.

(There's tons more to come so stay tuned)

don't worry I will

Chapters 5 and 6 out later this week - spread the word!

Clive

and chpt 2 of mine

hmm I did try to write to you with some advice about that (since you ask for tips on your space) last night but I closed the window I was writing in by accident - and the post was lost forever.

I'll see if I can re-compose it later.

Anyway I received an email just (I assume you have as well) that the 7th of December is an anniversary issue of so we'll both need another batch of material ready for this Sunday.

I've already got 27 chpts right now lol but I'm out of ideas

57 but it's a collaborative effort between several researchers. I also get the editing duties.

We're also not quite finished yet but we *do* know where we are going with our story - just means writing it.

wish I had an editor all I have is spell check which makes mistakes as in chapter 2 it says tam X instead of team X

... nvm the post team did that it didn't have that typo in the main story (still want a special editor whatever they are called who fix the problems with the messed up stuff) lol out of ideas on mine though if you wanna take a look at my whole story you can see it here ( A17112142 )

give me tips if you look

I will try to. The best advise I can give you in the meanwhile regarding spelling is to use your own eyes. The first test of spelling is to read back what your write and just look at it and judge for yourself.

Does a word look right to you? Try pronouncing it and check you haven't spelt something phonetically (how it sounds) (i.e 'pepoll' / 'people').

Always have a dictionary to hand so you can break it open to check something - even better if it has a thesaurus attached, because you can find some different words to express the point in a different way. There are websites such as http://www.dictionary.com that can be a quick reference - but watch out for American spellings ('Color' / 'Colour', 'Realize' / 'Realise.')

Lastly, copy your text into a programme like MS word and use the spell-check facility. I say copy it first because I recommend editing your work in a simpler programme like a text editor - because this will retain all the correct formatting for use in h2g2. MS Word tends to do strange things to speech marks " " and ... in particular.

A spell check function is a useful tool but it still won't beat your own good sense. This is because it can highlight genuine errors but will not detect double-positive errors (i.e replacing a word with a different one that is correctly spelt e.g 'red' instead of 'read' or homophones (words that sound the same) e.g 'their', 'there' / 'hear', 'here')


Clive.

I have add atention defesite disorder however it is spelled so I can't concetrate on re-reading it it just turns fuzzy and puts me to sleep but the spelling thing was them not me

I sympathise. I have a mild case of dyspraxia (related to dyslexia but not the same thing - dyspraxics have difficulty often presenting their work because of an impaired ability to co-ordinate our bodies. This was certainly true of me when I was at school. So my hand-writing can, if I let it, be messy and my grammar is occasionally non-existent - but typing what I write using word-processing programmes has been an easy way for me to communicate my ideas with fewer problems.

I re-read your post and realised you said it was an error by but you can minimise your own mistakes (and lord knows everyone does it) by trying some of what I said, if you can.

P.S

Attention Deficit Disorder

lol I have those problems to and a bad case of short term memory loss oh well atleast I'm still writing a story ... will be when I have some good inspiration

I sent Chapters VII and VIII to last week so they should be appearing soon. (How will our heroes escape? )

I need to do some work now though (preparing for an interview for a university training course in three weeks time plus I have a lesson to plan for next week since I am being given more responsibility at the school where I volunteer.)

I'll try to spare some time to read your story - from what I saw you have the ideas - just try expanding on them a bit more. because the chapters stuck me as a little short - but then brevity was a trick I never learnt, so perhaps shorter is better!

Clive

lol they seem longer on my computer(the leftover computer given to me when we got this new computer)

One last tip.

Try looking at the h2g2 coding system GuideML.

(There's a clinic to help you out) A187229

GuideML lets you put graphics into your work from a pre-fab library C809 as well as putting text in bold and italics and paragraphs.

As an example, compare A17768613 (written in plain text) with A13263437 (the version I submitted to )

You can see the code I have used to make the changes by looking at these two pages (which is the URL address copied from the address bar in my browser window, for the two above pages, with the "A" removed and the word "test" typed there instead.) Just to prove that GuideML it's not so difficult to master!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/test17768613
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/test13263437

Clive

??? ... guideml confuses me to much

Hmmm okay. Well perhaps not then particulaly if the ADD makes this hard. Just to explain however, essentially what GuideML does is instruct the text to behave in certain ways and any instruction has an 'opener' and a 'closer'

eg. to put something in italics you need the tag. the closed tag is

So in this sentence, the word italics is in italics.

Exactly the same is true of putting a word in bold text using

So in this sentence, the word bold is in bold.

To switch an entry into Guideml (notice GuideML tags don't work in forums like this one) when you crate a new guide entry there is an option at the bottom to use GuideML or plain text. (You can find this button if you edit your personal space and scroll down to the bottom.)

Anything you include between the tags (which means the article is included in the database) and the tags (which means the article is assigned a page number like A123456) will be included and can be edited using the different kinds of tags that are available in GuideML.

One last GuideML tag to mention is the paragraph break which can be used to seperate paragraphs. The rest is not much more complicated than that. So I hope even if you never use GuideML that that has helped to de-mystify it a little for you.