Freelance Amy

What My Cat Can Teach You About Freelancing and Working from Home

Happy New Year! As I take stock of the past year but mostly set goals for the current one, I’ve been observing my cat’s various and fascinating behaviors. It’s probably because I left her with a sitter for two weeks over the holidays and we both missed each other very much!

But anyway, my observations prompted me to write a second kitty-themed post since my first one was so much fun. So, here are the top 10 things my sweet Gemma (aka Little Jerk, or LJ) can teach us all about freelancing and working from home, with my translation into “hooman.”

1. Take Naps

Or find your equivalent, such as a daily meditative or relaxation practice or just some downtime away from your workspace. And make sure you get plenty of sleep.

2. Stretch

Do some yoga, core exercises, or basic muscle stretches to keep limber and prevent the shortening of hip flexor muscles (which happens when you sit at a desk all day).

3. Look Out the Window

Gemma cat sitting on her perch looking out the window

Look far into the distance to prevent eye strain. Do this several times a day.

4. Watch the Squirrels (or Lizards)

Series of three photos of Gemma cat watching a lizard through a window. In the first photo, the lizard is attached to the screen from the outside. In the second photo, the lizard has moved to the outside framing. In the third photo, only its tail is visible because it has slithered away from the window.

When you’re looking out the window, notice the physical world and appreciate all its wonders. Practice mindfulness techniques to get out of your head and reduce stress.

5. Mix Up Your Seating Positions

Gemma cat stretched out on the author's desk between the keyboard and computer monitor — (That’s the bottom half of a flamingo on the screen there, in case you were wondering.)

Change up your office ergonomics by trying a standing desk, sitting on a bean bag chair for a bit, or walking away from time to time.

6. Pounce

Gemma cat sitting at the top of her cat tree staring at the camera

Be ready to grab opportunities when they come. Answer potential client emails immediately, and reach out for the work you want.

7. Play for Play’s Sake

Gemma cat standing on the back of a couch next to a Christmas tree. She is reaching out a paw to bat the tree.

Scatter toys all around you. I recently discovered the wonders of pop-its and spinners from my, ahem, 49-year-old older brother (father of six and grandfather of four, I might add).

8. Snuggle With Soft Squishy Things

Gemma cat resting on the couch next to a soft pillow in the shape of a pineapple

Gemma cat snuggling on top of a bath towel in a laundry basket

Get a textured blanket and satiny pillows and even something to squeeze gently when stressed. My nine-year-old niece introduced me to squishmallows (I now have a pineapple, sloth, and unicorn—all in colors that match my décor, of course).

9. Be Careful You Don’t Get Bit

Selfie of author and Gemma cat. Author is laughing in background, while Gemma is in the foreground biting the author on the wrist.

Watch out for red flags and potentially difficult clients. Don’t take work you hate and don’t agree to hours that suck away your life force.

10. Seek Out the Sun

Find what makes you happy, and then soak it all in and relax.

To get regular tips on freelancing and working from home as well as access to my ebook Quick Guide to Freelancing, sign up for my biweekly newsletter. You can also follow me on social media by clicking on one of the links below or check out my online courses on editing, proofreading, and time management.

Hyperlinks for PDF Accessibility: Set Up for Maximum Efficiency

2021-12-08

Hyperlinks are useful navigation tools that provide readers access to additional information about a topic. They can even help users jump from one part of a long PDF document to another.

Note: This post targets folks who have an interest in and/or experience with working on accessibility. If you don’t fall into this audience, I still recommend reading through for some insight on making information accessible to all.

You may already know that meaningful link text makes for an accessible read as I discuss in my post about strategies for accessible documents. If you want to help readers learn more about a topic, you would link to the topic itself and not something like “learn more” or “click here.”

Example of meaningful link text: Go to the CDC website for more information about flu prevention.

In the example above, I have linked to “information about flu prevention” so that readers know exactly what the link is about. If I had linked to “CDC website” or “more information,” readers would be unsure about what, specifically, the link would take them to.

The problem with two-line links

A problem you may not be aware of, however, is the length of hyperlinks. Specifically, I’m talking about link text that breaks across two lines (or more?) of text.

It doesn’t matter much in a Word document, but you should know that these types of links cause problems for PDF accessibility remediation. The problem with links that break to a second line is that PDF readers, notably Adobe Acrobat, like to provide two link tags for the same link.

And why is this a problem? It’s a problem because the screen reader then reads them off as two separate links, thus confusing the user.

In some cases, we can’t avoid this happening. For that there is a fix for double links provided by accessibility guru Dax Castro—skip to minute 5:45 for the detailed tutorial in Acrobat. In this post, though, I’m more concerned with how to avoid double links at all.

What to do with long link text

To avoid having long link text that breaks to a second line, we have a couple solutions.

1. Link to the most specific and relevant information.

That is, focus on the most meaningful text and link to that. Something like “resources page on Acme Brothers’ recall response” could be shortened to “Acme Brothers’ recall response” or even just “recall response” if Acme Brothers is a main topic in the story.

2. Insert a nonbreaking space or hyphen.

Use this strategy when one word appears on a line by itself, or that word breaks at a hyphen. For example, in “solutions to everyday problems,” delete the space after “solutions” and insert a nonbreaking space there.

Or, in “empty-handed college students,” delete the hyphen and insert a nonbreaking hyphen in “empty-handed.”

As you have seen here, writing meaningful text is just the beginning when providing accessible hyperlinks. The next step is to ensure that the links can be remediated efficiently in a digital document.

If you only have one or two links to worry about, Dax’s fix I mentioned earlier is not such a heavy lift. However, if you have multiple links breaking across lines, it’s best to set them up properly in Word first. Then you can just remediate the ones (hopefully, only a handful) that can’t be modified.

To get regular tips on freelancing, editing, and accessibility as well as access to my ebook Quick Guide to Freelancing, sign up for my biweekly newsletter. You can also follow me on social media by clicking on one of the links in the sidebar. You can also check out my online courses on editing, proofreading, and time management.

What Are Microsoft Word Paragraph Styles?

2021-11-10

Woman typing while using Microsoft Word styles on her laptop — Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

The last time I wrote about MS Word, someone told me that Word is a four-letter word in their book. Seems a bit extreme, albeit literal. I particularly like MS Word and its paragraph styles function, but perhaps that’s because I’ve been using it for decades and came to design much later on.

In fact, my fellow designer friends tend to be the most passionate in their utter loathing. That makes sense given how powerful Adobe products like InDesign can be in producing engaging publications.

Necessary Evil

Sure, it can be buggy and Office 365 updates can be supremely annoying. For example, the onslaught of modern comments has resulted in incessant migraines for copy editors round the world, or at least those in my community. And back when Word switched up track changes, it took me a while to figure out how to use simple markup properly.

However, Word paragraph styles have made life so much simpler for those who know about them. I guess that’s the issue, though: most people, who are not designers anyway, don’t know about them!

Most people, in fact, continue to use multiple paragraph breaks and character spaces instead of page or section breaks; paragraph indents; table spacing; and white space around images, headings, and figures.

Sound Familiar?

Does that sound like you? And is your response the following: “Wait, what? That’s not how you’re supposed to do it?”

Man looking at his laptop with a frustrated expression on his face while sitting in a cafe booth. — Image by Tim Gouw from Pixabay

Let me ask you this: Has the notion of a table of contents awakened you in a cold sweat in the middle of the night? Do shifting page breaks frustrate you into reconsidering your life goals? Does image placement make you want to move to a remote mountain village never to be heard from again?

If you’ve answered yes to those questions, you can reconsider that answer just by learning how to apply Word paragraph styles. A clean table of contents doesn’t have to be a mystery and neither do fluid page breaks and images.

Painless Paragraph Styles

The basic concept of paragraph styles is to apply all the fonts AND spacing once so that the changes trickle down to the whole document. THEN, if you decide you want to add more space above or below a paragraph, you just need to make that fix once.

First, create one of your first paragraph styles by formatting any paragraph the way you want it to look. Set your font and font size. Next, go to the Layout tab in the Ribbon, and change the Before and After spacing in the Spacing section.

Create a basic paragraph style in Microsoft Word.

Finally, go back to the Home tab, go to the Styles section, right click over Normal, and select Update Normal to Match Selection. The screencast above doesn’t show the drop-down menu, but it is shown in the image below.

Update the Normal style to make all your paragraphs the same format.

Any paragraph that takes the Normal style now looks like the paragraph you just formatted. If you tweaked the spacing before or after the paragraph, you might see a whole lot of white space between all your paragraphs. That means you probably have extra paragraph breaks. Just click between the paragraph and delete until your cursor lands back at the beginning of the next paragraph.

Just the Beginning of Paragraph Styles

These steps are just the start of what can be done with MS Word paragraph styles, but they are the basic idea if you have been having trouble wrapping your head around a clean, effortless layout.

Once you can grasp this, you can move on to creating heading styles that not only support accessible documents but feed into an automated table of contents as well. You’ll also be able to get page breaks and images to stay where they need to be. That’s all for another day, though.

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