There are frustrations in publishing with iBooks Author…

Communicating with Apple is not one of the more enjoyable features of publishing iBooks, as anyone who has clicked on ‘Contact us’ at iTunes Connect will confirm. Most of the options offered do not take you to a contact form at all, but just lead to a few FAQs with ‘answers’. I have been waiting for over two weeks for the iBook version of Grammar for Teachers to be reviewed. In the end I found a ’Contact us’ option that offered a form I could fill in and – ever so politely – enquired when they were likely to review it.

I did get a reply, and I’ll quote it in full:

Hello John,

Thank you for contacting iBookstore Publisher Support.

Your title is currently in our review queue. We are experiencing a high volume of requests and appreciate your patience as your title makes its way through our review process.

If no errors are identified during the review process, the title will be made available for sale in the iBookstore within 24 hours of the completion of the review. You may monitor the status of your title through the Manage Your Books module in iTunes Connect.  Please note the status of your title will not change until after it has gone through review.  You may also monitor any tickets that may be issued against your title in the Ticket History module in iTunes Connect.

Best Regards,

Ben
iBookstore Publisher Support

As an example of corporate-speak, this is quite high grade. It’s also high grade tosh. Every single sentence in it, except one, tells me stuff that I already know, and that anyone who is publishing (or trying to publish) on their platform should know, too.

All that’s new is ‘We are experiencing a high volume of requests’ – or, put another way, Apple are too cheapskate to hire enough staff to run this side of the business properly.

But there’s nothing you can do, apart from sticking a few more pins into the apple on your desk (Golden Delicious, of course).

One of the pleasures of using iBooks Author is that it will give you as much structure, or as little, as you want. You stay in control.

Templates

If you just want to go ahead and compose your book, then you can choose one of the many templates that are now available. You use the page layouts and stylesheets that the template provides and construct your book.

As well as the templates provided in the iBooks Author software itself, you can get additional templates from these sites:

•  iBooks Author Templates
• Jumsoft
• Graphic Node
• Macmanus

Freedom

At the other end of the scale, you have more or less complete freedom to format your book exactly as you see it (in landscape mode, anyway). You can drop text into a text box and then manipulate it just as if it was an image. All the screenshots that follow were taken from an iPad:

NEXT PAGE: You can insert images…

I’ve just finished formatting Grammar for Teachers as an iBook, using  iBooks Author, Apple’s free app for making iBooks. In this article I’ll set out what I think are the most important features for educational authors like me. In later articles I’ll explain a bit more about how it can be used.

The first thing to point out is that using  iBooks Author you can do something that has so far been impossible. Up to now, if you wanted to make an eBook you had to choose whether you wanted your book to be fixed format or flowable.

Fixed format

A fixed format eBook mimics a printed book. All the elements that make up the page – typefaces, styles, images, and diagrams – are fixed on the screen. All the reader can do is make the whole page larger or smaller. On a small screen device like a Kindle, this means that you often have to enlarge the page so that you can only see a fraction of it at one time. The advantage of this is that the author-publisher can control how the pages look. You can include tables and know that they will come out as they should without being mangled in the way that Kindle often presents them. And you can incorporate diagrams that are the right size to be read. The downside is that the reader is often frustrated by the less than perfect reading experience. The overall result is that up till now, most self-publishers who wanted fixed format have published their books as PDFs. To do this, they have often had to sell from their own website, as I do. A good example of this publishing model is Take Control Books. This small company publishes excellent guides by expert writers about macs ands mac software. They now also offer Kindle and ePub versions of their titles.

Flowable

Devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook are convenient. They use a format that reflows the text to fit their (small) screens. The reader can adjust the size of the print to suit their eyesight and reading situation. As a result, the author-publisher has almost no control over layout, and tables and diagrams are a problem. On the other hand, a very big majority of the eBooks that are bought are sold for these two platforms.

What it’s like in practice

As an example, compare these two page views…

... and why I am using it

I started using iBooks Author just over three weeks  ago. In that time I have reformatted one of my books, Grammar for Teachers (more details here), using this new Apple software, turning it into an attractive, colourful, interactive textbook. So why start with reasons for not using iBooks Author? Well, you can’t criticise something until you have given it a good try, and – surprisingly – although there are things wrong with it, I think it is still worth persevering with. For reasons I’ll explain later.

Reasons for not using iBooks Author

1. It is limited to one platform
   You can only use it on a Mac, which is yet another reason for the majority of (non-Mac-using) self-publishers to feel hacked off.
2. You can only sell your books through Apple
   Who limit your pricing options and demand 30% of your income for the privilege. And the iBookstore hasn’t exactly set the world on fire.
3.  You have to sell via iTunes Connect
   To sell your book you have to use this non-intuitive, arrogant, uninformative website with a ‘Help’ system that seems to work rather more slowly than carrier pigeons. Amazon’s KDP is streets ahead in both efficiency and courtesy.
4. The export options are severely limited
   You only have three options:
   • the proprietary iBooks format, which is only for your own use or for free distribution
   • PDF, which is in fixed landscape format
   • text only
   So if you begin with an iBooks Author book, it is impossible to extract your formatted text and visuals in a usable form so that you can re-use them in a different format.
5. The Glossary feature is very limited
   You can only link one Glossary item to one word/phrase in the text, even though you might want to link the same phrase to more than one item. The linking feature reformats your text in unpredictable ways. And you can’t link a Glossary item to a table without various strange things happening.

And five good reasons for using iBooks Author

1. It makes complex fixed page layouts easy to achieve
   You can style your text as much as you like, and place text and images anywhere on the page. And you can build tables, with its excellent table editor.
2. It works seamlessly with Apple’s iWork Pages
   So you can compose in Pages, with all the text styles you want, then transfer text and styles to Author in a flash.
3. It has a comprehensive Glossary feature
   Any word or phrase can be linked as a Glossary item. When readers click on the word, a pop-up window gives them the definition. Alternatively they can go to the Glossary and look up any term they want to check. They not only get a definition, but also a clickable list of related terms and an index of places where that term is used.
4. It has an excellent range of interactive widgets
   So you can add self-tests, interactive images, Keynote presentations, sound, and video quickly and simply.
5. It allows both fixed format and flowable text
   In landscape mode your iBook  is fixed format with all the complex layouts and images you want to include, but readers who just want to browse the text can turn their iPad through 90 degrees and read it as text – but still call up images and interactive features as required.

And so…

I shall go on using iBooks Author for these reasons:

• It enables me to design and set out instructional/educational material in a highly designed way.
• It is easy to use, especially if you are accustomed to  page layout software like InDesign.
• I think I can incorporate it into a workflow that I can use to produce books in a variety of formats.
• It indicates the way things should and must go for e-textbooks. In the end either Apple will license its use for other marketplaces, or someone else will come up with software that will do the same job. And when that happens, i want to be able to take advantage of it.

A standard piece of advice about essay writing is that you should make a plan. I used to think – and some people still do think – that this is a linear process: generate ideas —> research —> plan. But of course it isn’t as simple as that.

This article is a continuation of Essay writing: answer the question!

Instead of that linear, 1-2-3, process, in practice it works much more like this:

Let’s take an example:

Many find that Measure for Measure fits uneasily into its First Folio category of Comedy. Consider the extent to which Shakespeare subverts or endorses the generic conventions of
  comedy.

Your initial reactions to this question might be:

The very fact that your reactions take the form of questions means that the next stage in essay writing is to do some research:

1. inside your head: recalling what you already know
2. in your notes: recalling what you have heard and read
3. in books and online

In turn this can (should!) lead to more notes and ideas. Here, for example, is a clip of a diagramatic set of notes on the first chapter of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres by Lawrence Danson:

(Download the full diagram as a pdf here.)

This research may lead to some early notes on how you might tackle the essay:

So in this case, initial ideas have led to research, which has resulted in some sketchy ideas about the plan. This in turn can generate fresh ideas or lead to further research. Most of the time it isn’t a clear-cut business. Even if you start with a reasonably clear plan, you nearly always find that later research generates new ideas that mean you have to adapt it.

Just how all this works depends not just on the subject matter, but also on how you like to work. Some people prefer to get everything cut and dried as early as possible, while others are happy to work in a freer way, keeping their options open and being prepared to re-write even at quite a late stage. The important thing to remember is that at some stage you have got to go through the threefold process of:

• generating ideas
• doing  research
• making a plan

And if you launch straight into the writing process, without first making a plan, you’ll still have to do the preparatory work – it will just be a lot messier.

You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.

If you find yourself struggling with essay writing, it’s often because you haven’t understood the question, or haven’t defined it clearly enough in your own mind. Essay writing problems are really thinking problems. Sometimes teachers set topics that are imprecise or vaguely worded. But if students just go along with this and write the essay without trying to define the subject more precisely, then they only have themselves to blame. But teachers quite often set topics that are deliberately open to interpretation, to find out what you make of them. Either way, you need to begin by defining the question to your own satisfaction before you begin planning and research. Even then, you may find that your definition changes as you work on the essay. But it is essential to start with a few notes, or even a paragraph setting out what you think the essay question means.

Question types

A good starting point is to ask yourself, ʻWhat is the question asking me to do?ʼ Essay questions often provide helpful clues to what is expected. For example:

1. What was the impact of e-commerce on EU business in the first decade of the twenty-first century?
2. What is meant by ʻfactoringʼ?
3. In King Lear, Gloucester and Lear both learn through suffering. In what other ways are they similar and how might their circumstances be said to be different?
4. ʻOil is the only important factor in Middle Eastern politics todayʼ. Discuss.
5. What were the main events leading up to the American Civil War?

Essay writing task types

Each of these questions asks the writer to perform a different task:

1. Analyse
   Question 1 asks the writer to examine a particular phenomenon and analyse its likely effects. Analytical questions ask the writer to tease out the significant features of a situation, to describe them, and to explain why they are significant.
2. Define
   Question 2 asks for a definition of an economic term. The writer is required to list its defining features and to support this definition by reference to good examples from the real world.
3. Compare and contrast
   Question 3 refers to two characters from a play who have similarities and differences and asks the writer to set these out. The question does not ask the writer to describe one character, describe the other, and then compare them. Instead the writer has to find key features of similarity and difference and build the essay up around these.
4. Argue a case
   Question 4 puts a challenging interpretation of a piece of recent history and asks the writer to examine the two sides of the argument and evaluate them.
5. Narrate
   Here the writer is being asked to tell a story. The danger of narrative is that writing it seems easy: anyone can tell a story and many people enjoy doing so. As a result writers often fall back on narrative, when they should be analysing, defining, or arguing.

You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.

Each of these types of question has its own distinctive structures and approaches. Sometimes questions are ʻpureʼ examples of one type, as in the examples quoted. More often they are hybrids, combining two or more types in one question.

Take this question, for example:

Many find that Measure for Measure fits uneasily into its First Folio category of Comedy. Consider the extent to which Shakespeare subverts or endorses the generic conventions of
  comedy.

On the face of it, this looks like a fairly straightforward type 2 question: you are being asked to define the play. Is it a comedy or isn’t it? But when you start to think about it, questions start to niggle. What was the First Folio category of Comedy? What are the generic conventions of comedy? Is there just one, or are there lots of different ones? Do different people have different answers to those questions? And anyway who said this play had to be put in that particular section of the First Folio?

In other words, the question is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. As a result you soon see that you are being asked to do more than one type of writing:

• Define
  This is what the question seems to be asking you to do: define what kind of play Measure for Measure is. So your essay has to amount to a definition.
• Analyse
  Before you can do that, you are going to have to analyse what was understood by the word ‘comedy’ in Shakespeare’s time – and possibly what we thinks it means now.
• Compare and contrast
  You will then need to compare and contrast the various definitions you have come up with.
• Narrate
  You may need to sketch in some of the history of this: how the definition of comedy was changing at the time that Shakespeare wrote the play. You might want to set this against the history of time, explaining how the arrival of James I as King of England changed things.
• Argue a case
  And when you have got all these possibilities open in front of you, you need to provide your own take on the question and explain why it is right.

You’ll find more about essay writing in my book
The Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking.

The second article in the series on essay writing can be found here.

If you want to improve your command of English words, you need to take a positive and active approach to developing your vocabulary. Here’s a simple ten-point plan to help you get a grip on words.

1: Take a positive attitude towards building your vocabulary.

Remember that you have a passive vocabulary of words that you understand but rarely or never use. There are also a lot of words that you have seen or heard more than once but feel rather hazy about. Make a real effort to move words from these lists into the list of words that you feel comfortable about using.

2: Use a good dictionary and thesaurus.

If you need to find out or check the meanings of words, use a good dictionary. Work at it to make sure that you can use it efficiently and confidently. When writing, make use of a good thesaurus to find all the possible words and then to choose the best for your purpose.

3: Remember that there is always a choice of words.

Especially when writing, don’t just settle for the first word that comes into your head. Think of other words that might be more accurate or more suitable. Whenever possible use a thesaurus to widen the choice of words available to you.

4: Think about your audience’s skills and knowledge.

We use words to communicate, and communication is a two-way process. Think about who will hear or read your words: make an assessment of their language skills and try to avoid words that they will find difficult or impossible to understand. Think also of their knowledge of the subject you are talking or writing about. Use terms that they will understand and, if you have to use a term that they may not be familiar with, make sure that you explain it the first time you use it.

5: Think about the social setting in which you are communicating.

Communication isn’t just about using language accurately; it also involves thinking about your relationship with your audience. Words that are fine in one social setting will jar horribly in another. So think about formality and informality. By all means use colloquial language and even slang in the right context, but if you are unsure of your audience, avoid slang like the plague.

6: Avoid jargon.

Jargon is fun for insiders but can be guaranteed to irritate everyone else. So unless you are in the company of ‘consenting adults in private’, don’t use it!

7: Tune into new words but don’t be seduced by them.

Language is a living organism and words grow old and die, just as new words are born. English is a world language. It is par excellence the language of the Internet. So new words come flooding into it from all over the globe. Some of these will become a part of the language and will be widely used. Most will soon fade and die. So be aware of new words, cherish them, but don’t waste time trying to be always in fashion. If you do, you will probably end up looking ridiculous.

8: Learn more about how words are used in sentences.

You cannot develop your vocabulary or use dictionaries and other word reference books effectively unless you have a basic knowledge of how words work in sentences. This will also benefit your use of the langauge as a whole, especially your writing.

9: Understand word structure and use your knowledge to tackle new words.

Many words are constructed from common parts. Work to understand this system: learn the meanings of common prefixes and the uses of suffixes in the building of new words. Use this knowledge to help with any long words that bother you.

10: Have fun with words!

The English language is a wonderful thing: infinitely expressive, remarkably flexible, and growing in scope all the time. So don’t let words master you – get a grip on them. And enjoy them.

This article is based on Lexis – an introduction to English words.

It’s been a long time in the making, but my latest title, Lexis – an introduction to English words is finally available.

You can see full details here.

Lexis takes a relaxed and – I hope – entertaining look at our vocabulary. It begins by asking, ‘How many words do you know?’ and offering one way of finding out the answer, before pulling the rug away from the whole idea! In fact the question is almost impossible to answer. For a start, what do you mean by word, and what do you mean by know? They seem straightforward enough, but as soon as you begin to examine them, you find they aren’t as simple as they might at first appear.

Then there are chapters on the way in which words can help and hinder effective communication, before we move on to the history of english words and the interesting topic of how new words are created. The first part of the book concludes with a quick and fairly painless look at the grammar of words, and offers a 10-point plan for ‘Getting a grip on words’.

The second part of the book is a reference section, with detailed information on:

• Word classes: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and determiners.
• Prefixes and their meanings.
• How suffixes are used to form new words.
• A list of words that are frequently confused, with definitions and examples.
• A glossary of technical terms.
• A list of print and online resources

Lexis is available as a printable PDF with interactive table of contents and hyperlinks. You can get from the Store, for just $4.50/£3.00.

Alternatively you can buy the Kindle version:
Amazon UK
Amazon US

The iBook version is available from the Apple iBookstore:
iBookstore UK
iBookstore US

Rather confusingly, the word ‘verb’ is used in two different ways: to describe a type of word and to describe part of a clause. In this article I will treat these two separately.

Verbs as a word class

In this sense, verbs are on the same level as nouns, adjectives and adverbs.

One of the key features of verbs is that they change their form, or inflect more than other words.

Verb inflection
Verbs inflect like this:

Forms of the verb
So we can say that all verbs have five forms, or parts:

• stem walk
• present tense walk/walks
• past tense walked
• -ing participle walking
• -ed participle walked

We can can use the stem to form the infinitive: to walk.

Regular and irregular verbs
All verbs do not work in the same way as the example we have used. Walk is regular. Irregular verbs are less predictable in the way they form the five parts:

• stem eat
• present tense eat/eats
• past tense ate
• -ing participle eating
• -ed participle eaten

There are far more regular verbs than there are irregular, but many of the commonest verbs are irregular.

Find out more
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

Main verbs

Verbs can be divided into three groups:

• verbs that need an object
  Elephants eat grass.
• verbs that do not need an object
  Elephants exist.
• linking verbs
  Elephants are animals.

Verbs that need an object
In normal speech, Elephants eat… is incomplete because it leaves us asking, eat what? Verbs like eat that need an object are called transitive.

Verbs that do not need an object
Exist on the other hand does not have to be followed by an object and is an intransitive verb.

It is important to note that some verbs can be both transitive and intransitive. For example, work:

It’s a formula that is obviously working.
He trains people to work the machine.

Linking verbs
These verbs are used to link a subject and its complement. They include be, seem, and appear.

Every sentence must contain at least one main verb.

Did you know?
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

Auxiliary verbs

There is also a group of verbs that don’t have a dictionary meaning, and are not normally used on their own in a sentence. They are used with main verbs. For example:

A

I am eating bread.
They have eaten bread.
You do eat bread.

B

I shall eat bread.
I might eat bread.
I could eat bread.

All these verbs are called auxiliaries because they help main verbs. They have been divided into groups A and B, because they have different characteristics.

Primary verbs
The verbs in Group A, be, have, do can also work as main verbs. For example:

• I am happy to see these names included.
• I have a new life now and new friends.
• We do things that are controversial.

These primary verbs are thus dual-function.

Modal auxiliaries
The verbs in Group B cannot work as main verbs and normally appear with a main verb. These are the modal auxiliaries:

• will – shall – would – should
• may – might
• can – could
• must
• ought (+to)

Verbs as a clause element

Sometimes the verb in a clause consists of just one word:

A prisoner escaped.

Often it is more than one word:

A prisoner has escaped.

The verb in a clause is more accurately called the verb phrase. The verb phrase can contain several words:

She should have been working today.

The important thing to remember is that each of these words is a verb.

The full facts
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

Tenses

We saw above that English verbs have two tense forms: present (I work) and past (I worked).We change the form of the verb to give information about time.

But the verb phrase can give us a lot more information than that, and we often use the word ‘tense’  in a looser and wider way: to describe the form of the verb phrase that provides information about time and aspect. ‘Time’ refers to past, present, and future; ‘aspect’ refers to the focus that the verb phrase gives us on what is being described.

English tenses
In the broader meaning of the word, English has these tenses:-

Tense and aspect
We have already seen one form of the present tense:

Elephants eat grass.

English has, however, more than one form of the present tense. Compare these two sentences:

I eat plenty of vegetables and I don’t like chocolate.
The ladies watching the late afternoon episode of ‘Crossroads’ are eating Mr Kipling cakes from their local Safeway, wearing their Crimplene trouser suits.

They are both ‘present’ in the sense that both describe something that is true at the time of writing. But only the second describes something that is obviously happening at that moment. We call the first (eat) the simple present, and the second (are eating) the present continuous.

There is also a third form of the present. Compare this sentence with the two previous ones:

I have eaten there; it is wonderful and not ferociously expensive.

It refers to an event that happened in the past, but the speaker is still thinking about it – its effects, good or bad, are still in his or her mind. So, it is in one sense ‘present’. In another sense it is past, completed – the action has been ‘perfected’. Hence the name of this tense, the present perfect.

These three versions of the present tense, simple, continuous and perfect are called aspects. They allow us to use considerable sophistication when talking about events.

Tense and time
Despite the wide range of tenses English has to offer, there are also many other ways in which we can indicate time in our sentences. The simple present tense, for example, can be used to talk about past, present, future and timeless events:

He goes into a restaurant and he says, ‘Oh the waiter, erm, let me see the menu…’ (past)
Rooney shoots… It’s a goal! (present)
Tomorrow we enter the mountains, and everything will change. (future)
Fairly pure water freezes at about 0°C (if given sufficient time). (timeless)

Future time, in particular, is represented in a variety of ways:

Tomorrow we enter the mountains, and everything will change.
(Simple present used for scheduled actions.)

Tomorrow we are holding a party in our bungalow, which has room for about 60 people…
(Present continuous used for plans.)

We are going to change the world of the media!
(going to future for plans.)

We shall look at these issues more fully later on.
(will/shall future: unmarked future)

Buy the book!
You can find out much more about verbs in my downloadable book
Grammar for Teachers.

After a good dictionary, a thesaurus is the most useful word reference book in a writer’s library … provided you know how to use it.

The name ‘thesaurus’ comes from a Classical Greek word meaning ‘treasury’ or ‘store’, and a thesaurus is just that: a treasure-house of words. The thesaurus was invented in the mid-19th century by Peter Mark Roget who published, in 1852, his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, classified and arranged so as to facilitate the Expression of Ideas and assist in Literary Composition. Roget organized his work into a number of basic concepts, each of which was then broken down into subconcepts. Some modern thesauruses follow a modified version of Roget’s categories, while others have taken the basic idea and developed it in their own way. The Bloomsbury Thesaurus, for example, has 23 basic concepts, such as ‘Communication’. Each of these is then broken down into sections such as ‘Truth’ and ‘Falsehood’. These are then usually broken down into further sections such as ‘authenticity’ and within each of these sections words are grouped according to word class (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs).