Relief rippled through the land

This is a Mac thing. If you don't have a Mac, you can skip this post.

So I got an Air last year, Apple's svelte laptop. I love the thing. I really do. But I bought the 11-inch model, wanting something that was easy to haul around. And 11 inches is not a large screen.

On a Mac, it's (usually) easy to zoom the screen. But there seemed to be no way to zoom the desktop on the Air, which was really terrible. Some of the type is so tiny. You can make most of it larger but the system fonts remained (way too) small. I couldn't see them, which meant I couldn't see menu options. I went to user help sites but the people there were complaining about it too. It remained my only disappointment with the Air.

Now, this option may always have existed but only today did I find the answer to my question. I upgraded to Mountain Lion last week, and I found a Mountain Lion thread that answered the most pressing concern for 11-inch Air owners: how do you zoom the screen?

Turns out, all you have to do is go to Keyboard in System Preferences, choose Keyboard Shortcuts, click on Accessibility, and turn on the zoom option. Problem solved. I can zoom my Air screen! Woot!

A simple language trick

Listing items in a sentence should be simple but people often screw it up. I don't think many people notice the problem I'm concerned with here, but I'm going to help you see it and fix it in your own writing.

Let's use an example from a science article at physorg. It's about efforts to head off climate change. Here's one sentence from the article:

"Initially, those efforts will probably take the form of limits on greenhouse gas emissions or forest preservation."

Do you see the problem? The sentence refers to "limits on greenhouse gas emissions or forest preservation," implying that the word "limits" applies to both terms. But the efforts probably won't include limiting forest preservation. Mind you, it would have been worse if it said "gas emissions and forest preservation." Perhaps the poor soul who wrote this assumed s/he'd fixed the problem by using "or" instead of "and". Nope.

It's easy to avoid this problem: just re-order your list. The sentence would be clear if it was written as follows:

"Initially, those efforts will probably take the form of forest preservation or limits on greenhouse gas emissions."

See? Problem gone. Just say "forest preservation" as a lone positive, and then use the word "limits" only in reference to greenhouse gas emissions.

Check the order of things you list in sentences. Does that list really make sense? Take any modifier that occurs before the list begins and apply the modifier to each of the objects in the list, to see if the meaning is sound for every item. The solution is always as simple as above: just change the order of the list (which usually means taking the lone item that doesn't work with the modifier and putting it first -- before the modifier).

This message is brought to you by the editing fairy. May he always be well!