The Copy Chief at Wired News Tony Long has written an acidic attack on the role of technology in the decline of writing standards.

It is technology — IM, text messaging and email — which he argues is (mostly) to blame:

“it doesn’t matter whether you are reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone’s inane blog — the quality bar is set lower than ever.”

Whether or not you find his argument persuasive, you will enjoy the verbal imagery.

It runs the whole gamut from poetic (“[Email's] speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.”) to the more direct (“… it’s not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It’s important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well…. It’s important to think before you write.”)

I want to believe him. Goodness knows there’s some barely legible stuff out there. But are things really more badder?

I couldn’t shake a niggle from the back of my mind. Then I remembered what it was:

…Two evils, Ignorance and Want of Taste, have produced a Third; I mean the continual Corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely Remedy, will suffer more by the false Refinements of Twenty Years past than it hath been improved in the foregoing Hundred.

— Jonathan Swift, “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue”, The Tatler, 1710.text, email, IM, standards, punctuation, grammar, the good old days, language, technology, Jonathan Swift

TextSoap, the text cleaning and formatting utility, has been updated.

The new version is more more stable and usable.

Previously, TextSoap crashed under some configurations (bad) and the Contextual Menu items would sometimes disappear (bad). Also, opening a plain text file did not always use the plain text font (annoying). But these issues are now fixed.

It also includes a work-around for working with text in Mail.app 2.x, which has a peculiar way of supporting two-way Services.

TextSoap costs USD 24.99, but a 30 day demo is available from the developer?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s web site .text, tips, helpful apps, mail.app, apple mail, textsoap, cleaning, formatting, text utilities, Services

Textpander is an app that saves time and effort by storing frequently typed text (or snippets), which you can then insert as you type with a user-defined abbreviation.

The developer has released it recompiled as a universal binary, ready to run on the new Intel Macs.

Textpander is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site.

(Witch, a neat window switching utility, has also been released as a universal binary).

CuteClips is an expanded clipboard utility.

It can store up to twelve recently copied elements — images, URLs, text or files — in a nice smoked glass dialog, complete with preview.

Hitting a hotkey (Shift-Command-V by default) brings up the utility’s dialog:

Clicking on one of the stored entries, pastes it at the current position of the cursor.

You can also create “sticky” clips, by holding down the Option key while clicking on a current entry.

I like little productivity-enhancing apps like this because these helpful apps help me work faster in Mail.app and elsewhere.

A demo limited to three slots and with no access to the utility’s preferences is available from the developer’s web site. The full version costs 5 euros (c. USD 6).

CopyPaste, another extended clipboard utility, offers far richer features, but is also far more expensive (USD 30).

Rob Griffiths of macOSXHints fame has posted a tip for reducing the delay between selecting text and being able to drag it in Cocoa-based applications like Apple Mail. Normally, you need to select the text, click and wait for a second, then drag it.

It involves a simple Terminal hack. Open Terminal and type (exactly):

This will reduce the delay from the one second default to a tenth of a second in all your Cocoa-based apps (‘-g’ stands for ‘global’).

You will, of course, need to restart them for the change to take effect.

I get caught out by this sometimes in Mail.app, and end up having to select the text I want twice. Not any more!

Imagine a utility that bundles together the auto-expanding text snippet features of Textpander and the multiple clipboard functions of iClip.

CopyPaste + yType is it.

Like iClip or iSnip, it offers multiple clipboards and adds access through the contextual menu to make insertion even easier. It can also automatically record the history of the things that you have copied.

Like Textpander, this app offers predefined keyboard shortcuts for inserting blocks of frequently used text.

This makes working faster, of course, but also reduces the amount of errors in your typing. Further spelling errors are reduced by its ability to correct common spelling errors on the fly like Microsoft’s “autocorrect feature”.

The clipboard, text snippet features and preferences are all accessible through an icon in the Statusbar.

MacAddict Magazine describes it as “the turbo clipboard utility on steriods”. I’ve only been playing with CopyPaste for thirty minutes, but I can already see how this is going to make working in Apple Mail (and with text more generally) faster, more error-free and easier on the fingers.

CopyPaste is shareware (USD 30) and is available from the developer’s web site. It offers a thirty day free trial period during which you could play around with it and see if the utility lives up to its promise. That’s what I will be doing.