Proofreading Tips: Lorem Ipsum and the Quick Brown Fox

Catriona Tippin

All about filler text 

Here’s a facility you may not know you have at your fingertips – placeholder or filler text. If you’re trying out a font or drafting a page layout you could find you need a sample of random text. Most word processing programs offer the option to type =lorem() and then press enter and have some garbled Latin appear. 

You can include parameters in the brackets as (p,l) with p as the number of paragraphs you want, and l as the number of lines in each of the paragraphs. Voila! As many paragraphs as you need with varying word and sentence length and a mix of letters. The ‘Latin’ concerned is a scrambled excerpt from Cicero’s 1st century BC text ‘About the Purposes of Good and Evil.’ Its use as filler text expanded in the 1960s, it was apparently chosen at random and it was popularised by ‘Letraset’. 

In that pre-digital age graphic designers used Letraset transfer sheets. Anyone old enough will recall how revolutionary Letraset was: with hundreds of fonts and graphic images on sticky sheets, and with careful positioning and burnishing, we could be instantly creative. ‘Instantly’ by the standards of the time, of course. Memories of that era still make me appreciate everything possible now. Today we change fonts on a whim, add, amend, move and remove images, etc – so useful. 

Letraset created transfer sheets using ‘lorem ipsum’ as filler text, and it became recognised as usefully meaningless. Using anything which makes sense can be distracting when the aim is to indicate ‘this is where the text goes’. Occasionally you’ll catch a glimpse of filler text (and it’s usually lorem ipsum) when a website has been freshly constructed but not finally polished. It can slip into print too, when used for placeholding but missed on the final proofread. 

The internet being the playground that it is, there are alternatives available. These include hipster ipsum (achingly hip) cupcake ipsum (calorific but garbled) and zombie ipsum (braiiins etc). They have the disadvantage of unavoidably encouraging reading, though. Filler text needs to be just that, filling but unintriguing. This is the disadvantage of the word processing programme default offering of random text when you type =rand() and then press enter. It’s a chunk of manualspeak, but a bit too readable. Older word processing versions offered the famous sentence:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 

This is a ‘pangram’ – it includes every letter in the alphabet used at least once so it’s useful for seeing how a font looks. You can still find it when you type =rand.old() and then press enter. Both these ‘rand’ commands can have quantities of paragraphs and lines (p,l) included in the equation. Did you know there’s an even shorter sentence with every letter in the alphabet?: 

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. 

Good, eh? So there you go, an assortment of commands for conjuring up placeholder text. As well as helping in the design of a page layout, you never know, hitting enter and seeing all that text pop up might shift writer’s block. Or save you typing ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ over and over and over again... 

Note on the thumbnail: this quick brown fox appears over the door of The Fox, a popular pub in Holgate, York, and dates from 1878.

Catriona Tippin aka @ProofReadingTip will be back next month with more proofreading tips. 

To see previous tips, click on this proofreading link.

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Catriona Tippin has been a member of SCBWI since 2006 and helps organise venues for SCBWI North East. Details of her writing and illustrating here. She proofreads study guides, house magazines and publicity material for two national educational charities, in addition to working on a variety of proofreads and copyedits for the growing self-published world. Her monthly column is intended to give you food for thought, remembering “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling or typographical error” (McKean’s Law, named after its inventor Erin McKean, editor of the Oxford American Dictionary). 

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 16th September

I'm sure I wasn't the only one buoyed up by Jan's super-positive editorial at the weekend. And there certainly is plenty of good stuff out there if you know where to look, as this week's Blog Break once again proves.

Every writer is looking for the golden ticket, an idea which is just so compelling that it will motivate them to do their best work and crack the market wide open. But how can you identify a breakout premise for a picture book? Natascha Biebow has plenty of advice at Picture Book Den.

My drawing of Pilbeam the robot from Cakes in Space

I was at Sarah McIntyre and Philip Reeve's book launch for Cakes in Space on Saturday, and I can confirm that a very good time was had by all. Amongst the treats on offer were drawing lessons, a new song and interactive video comedy involving sporks(!) But fear not if you couldn't make it, because Sarah has written a blog post with tons of photos from the event.



There's a fantastic interview with Sam Zuppardi on the Scottish Book Trust website this week. I especially liked the anecdote about his childhood biblical confusion!

Candy Gourlay is exploring diaries this week, discussing how they can be used for personal reflection, as creative fodder and as an exercise for author visits. She shares some great tips for keeping a diary, and lets us have a peek at the diaries the kids made in response.

Finally, I found a lot of food for thought this week in Marie Basting's blog post all about embracing the dark side of her creative personality. It set me wondering as to why it is that we become compelled to write certain stories, even when we're trying to do something quite different. That led me to my own post a few days later, all about a character that I just can't stop writing about.

Nick.

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A SCBWI member since 2009, Nick Cross is an Undiscovered Voices winner who currently writes children's short fiction for Stew Magazine (September issue out now).

Nick's most recent blog post (mentioned above) traces The Evolution of Max.

Reasons to be Cheerful

For ages we've been hearing that we're in a very tough market, people who might have been snapped up ten years ago, are very much unsnapped in 2014. But this week there were three pieces of news that declared loud and clear that children's books is where it's at.

 1  'Almost All the Books People Say Influenced Them Were Written for Children' 

… says Mother Jones, based on the findings of a recent Facebook status update.  It's a high calling to write for younger readers. To inspire, encourage to aspire,  and potentially to turn non readers into readers all bear the weight of responsibility. Young minds are not referred to as 'formative' for nothing. Harry P. came out as most influential and I'm pleased; JKR turned my children into readers.

2 'Young read more books than older generation, research finds'

…says The Guardian from data compiled by Pew Research Internet Project. The young in question are young Americans but it's fair to assume that we may find the same in the UK. Young people also prefer print books. They've grown up with digital and according to some young people I know, it's boring. If they're on a device it's more likely to be a phone or a tablet rather than a kindle. Only yesterday my youngest daughter (19yrs) was in the garden with two of her friends poring over her new smartphone and an old suitcase…of books.

3 'Children's market 10% up on 2013'

…says The Bookseller about the children's market in the UK, making it the fastest growing book sector.  Charlotte Eyre, children's editor at The Bookseller, says 'if the market stays more than 10% ahead of last year’s figures, it is projected to be worth £337m in 2014—the best year the children’s sector will have had since BookScan records began in 1998.'

I'm all smiles.

It's Saturday morning and in an hour's time I'm heading off to The Primary School Visits MasterClass, launching my efforts to get out there as per last Sunday. So here's a quick run down of last week, all beginning with A for Amazing!

• Amber Caraveo - her and Joanna Moult are launching Skylark Literary in November and you can get a heads up on what rocks Amber's world by listening here.
• Apps are where it's at too; in the month of motivation and challenge Helen Dineen turns the challenge of digital on its head - can apps inspire print picture books?
• And we have a flying pig! I love flying pigs, they're so …. unexpected. However it's no surprise that illustrator Anna Violet's work is well out there; it's so much fun. Take a look at her gallery here and see for yourself.
• Anita Loughrey hits the headlines, today for me, yesterday for you. I love the fact that SCBWI Super Volunteer Anita has outgrown her bookcase. Inspirational, worthy of some great big cheers and perhaps a cocktail or two!

Next week you can look forward to some more of Catriona's proofreading tips, more brilliant blog choices from Nick, revisiting Philippa's inspiration published a week early last Monday (very easy to do believe me) and on Friday, particularly for illustrators, Helz Cuppleditch on branding & licensing.

(Lovely to see everyone at  Jane Clarke's excellent primary school visits masterclass today - thank you Jane. I came away enthused. Great to catch some of Anita's last BookBench hunt; I hope the margaritas were all you wished for!)

Jan Carr

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Jan Carr is the editor of Words & Pictures. Her fiction is all over the place, she blogs occasionally and loves to write in magenta. You can contact her at editor@britishscbwi.org.

Author's Published Works Outgrow her Bookcase!

We are delighted to celebrate with the very lovely Anita Loughrey Super SCBWI Volunteer, organiser of London* and much published author!

A few weeks ago Anita revealed on Facebook that the Loughrey household had a furniture issue. Namely that Anita's published works had outgrown her bookcase. If that's not something to celebrate I don't know what is. Over to Anita...


'This month I celebrated two deliveries of new books. The first was from Ransom publishing and contained the second series of Starstruck books co-written with Steve Rickard under the pseudonym of Cathy West. They are aimed at fourteen year old girls with a reading age of seven. There are six new books in the new series – Bollywood, Hip-Hop, Street Style, Street Theatre, Star Singer and Stand-up Comedy.

The second parcel was from Harper Collins and contained the Science Around You teacher resources written for the Abu Dhabi Education Council and are closely matched to their science curriculum. The ADE resources include two teacher folders, two pupils' books, two homework books, two practical books and two digital resource packs aimed at Year Two (6-7 years olds).

The piles of books sat on my desk for several weeks because there was no room on my bookshelf to put them. I had mixed feelings – I am very proud that I have written so many books – there are 68 in total, although some are now out of print. But, the thought of having to clear a shelf and maybe even tidy my study gave me a headache. I was moved into action though because I got another commission and I needed room on my desk to start it. So after much deliberation, I decided to clear the bookshelf above the original bookshelf. The shelf to be cleared was full of Writers’ Forum magazines, which contain my monthly column on Research Secrets. I have written this column since October 2008 and so the shelf contained 61 copies of Writers’ Forum. Most of these magazines have been put in the attic and I have only kept this year’s in a magazine holder on another shelf, which contains, ‘Magazines I have written for’.

The New Bookcase!

I have measured my published books on the two shelves and they are not quite a metre long - they are 91cms. However, this does not include the Adventure Passport project, which is due for release at the end of September. I am thinking I may need to clear another shelf.'

Adventure Passport due for release this month!

Congratulations Anita!

We wish you much strength, emotional and physical, to face yet another round of tidying up.

Aahh, the trials of publication!

*We think Anita probably could organise London but at the moment she does a brilliant job with the SCBWI London network and their amazing socials.

Featured Illustrator: Anna Violet

For Featured Illustrator this month we spotlight Manchester based artist Anna Violet. A familiar presence in SCBWI and contributor to Words & Pictures, Anna's tactile and vibrant illustrations are rendered in a wide variety of materials including watercolour, ink and collage, all tied together with her own idiosyncratic style. See the Featured Illustrator Gallery for more examples of her work.

Personal path

Anna Violet - self portrait as a child

I was a child in the 1960s. I grew up with illustrations by Jean Primrose (Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, author Rumer Godden, 1961), Maurice Wilson (Fables from Aesop retold by James Reeves, 1961), Shirley Hughes (My Naughty Little Sister, author Dorothy Edwards, 1969) Alice and Martin Provensen (Iliad and the Odyssey, retold by Jane Werner Watson, 1965) and Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, 1964).

Maurice Wilson's illustrations captivated me,
especially his foxes

This book even had instructions on how to make a
Japanese house!

Clumsy, messy and shy, I pondered on whether pigs could really fly and if fairies and harvest mice roamed wild in our garden. When I wasn't arguing with my brothers, looking after my mice or searching for dragons with my fairy wand, I had my nose in a book and my fingers in the pencils, mud and modelling clay. I was really chuffed to win a runner-up consolation prize in a Kellogg's Cornflakes competition for my drawing of a tram. I was also very proud of a Japanese doll's house I made from firelighters.

My drawing of a bus.

I didn't want to grow up, but accepted the inevitable when I hit my my teens. I trained and worked as a landscape architect for over 15 years, for three different councils. Armed with a parallel motion drawing board, a set square and stencils, I drew onto large sheets of tracing paper with technical drawing pens, scratched out mistakes with scalpel blades, and coloured-in dyeline prints with pantone pen markers. Computer-aided design was a mere speck on the horizon. Sometimes, I also had fun making models for meetings. At weekends, I made mess with clay and slip-trailers.

Paints, wobbly lines and happy accidents

When I became a mother in my thirties, I revisited childhood. My first born developed type 1 diabetes as a toddler and I became very focussed on home. It was a joy to rediscover picture books and children's fiction and share them with my children. I was impressed by Gerald Rose (Ahh Said Stork, 1977), John Burningham (Oi Get Off Our Train, 1989), Nick Butterworth (After The Storm, 1992), Margaret Bloy Graham (Harry the Dirty Dog, author Gene Zion, 1956), Cressida Cowell (How to Train Your Dragon series), Dave McKean (Varjak Paw series, author SF Said, 2003), Antony Browne (Voices in the Park, 1998), Patrick Benson (Owl Babies, author Martin Waddell, 1992), Satoshi Kitamura (Angry Arthur, author Hiawyn Oram, 1997) and Sam Lloyd (Mr Pusskins, 2006).

I love all the different marks Sam Lloyd uses in her illustrations.

One of my paintings from 1990s.

I loved messing around with paints, wobbly lines and happy accidents, without the constraints of technical drawing. I exhibited in galleries and did craft sessions with children. In 2006, I was lucky to get the chance to do a degree in illustration and get up to speed with computer technology and contemporary illustration at Stockport College, a bus-ride away. I graduated in 2009. I was introduced to the work of graphic designers and illustrators, including Paul Rand, Saul Steinberg, Christopher Corr and Beatrice Alemagna. I experimented with new toolkits (especially ink and string) and developed collage skills. I learnt the value of playfulness and I learnt the mantra, 'Less is More'. I started to sell limited edition prints of Manchester scenes and do decorative maps and commissions.

Decorative map for National Trust leaflet 2010 (Anna Violet)

Castlefield area in Manchester  (Anna Violet)

 Technique

I begin my images by sketching and playing around with marks. Then I cut, scan, copy and collage. I do lots of observational drawings in my sketchbooks, and sometimes these lead to ideas.

My sketchbook pages with start of hedgehog character

My sketchbook images from Cheshire Show 2014.
Start of new goat character.

My sketchbook images from Cheshire Show 2014

In 2009, I joined SCBWI and shared stories with other illustrators and writers in crit groups, both online and in the Manchester group. In 2010, I won the Undiscovered Voices Tribute Illustration competition.

My winning entry for scbwi Undiscovered Voices
Tribute Illustration competition

I went to SCBWI masterclasses and the SCBWI conference 2011. I started to appreciate author-illustrators  Catherine Rayner (Augustus and His Smile, 2006), Alexis Deacon (Beegu, 2003), Helen Stephens (How to Hide a Lion, 2014), Lizzy Finlay (Dandylion, 2009), Sarah McIntyre (Sharks in the Bath, 2014) and Jon Klassen. In 2013, I won the SCBWI Promo Mailer competition and my prickly hedgehog image was selected for the 2013/2014 touring SCBWI Illustration Showcase.  My illustrations have been published in Oxford Reading Tree Books in 2011 (How Anansi Got His Stories, level 8) and 2014 (Big Ears and Sticky Fingers, Infact level 9) and Spider magazine (Carus Publishing) 2013.

How Anansi Got His Stories (OUP 2011)

I've been developing my writing with several picture book stories - stories with harvest mice, fledgling umbrella birds, frogs, wrens, shrews, foxes and dragons. Oh, and I've been pondering again on whether pigs can really fly...

Pig flying over Beech Road, Manchester (Anna Violet)

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Check Anna's Featured Illustrator Gallery page to see many more examples of her work. Her personal website is at  www.annaviolet.co.uk
Follow Anna on her blog here

Using Story Apps for Inspiration

Hello, my name is Helen, and I'm a bit of an iPad app addict. And shhh, don't tell anyone but 95% of the apps I own are for children! I really enjoy sharing them with my son (6) and daughter (4). So much so that since 2012 I have been writing reviews on and off at my blog CAppTivated Kids. (I've just started blogging again, if you fancy a visit.)

This month the Words and Pictures theme is Motivation and Challenge. There's been a growing debate about the challenge apps might pose to physical books. I've joined in, blogging about it on CApptivated Kids and also on Picture Book Den earlier this year.

But I wanted to take a different angle for Words and Pictures. So here's a writing challenge I took on earlier this year - to use story apps to feed into writing "traditional" picture books.

I haven't (yet!) tried to write a story suitable for an app. Writing apps is a comparatively new discipline, and there is so much to think about. It's not simply a question of adding a few beeps and animations to an existing 500 word text. Kate Wilson of stand-out app publishers Nosy Crow explains it very well in this blog post. It's a real challenge to create significantly more content than your standard picture book, and to marry it seamlessly with the technology. And as Kate says, you need to work with others on "illustration, animation, voice audio and music." Not an easy task!

But on the flip side, I wonder what we as writers can learn from apps and bring back to picture books? This might be a bit of a controversial question, to which some would answer "nothing!" After all, as the upstart younger brother, apps have taken a lot of what they know from physical books. But I think apps represent an exciting new branch of storytelling. Even if you might have reservations about their place in children's reading, it's worth seeing what we can learn from them.

Choice is such a big part of apps, much more so than many physical picture books, allowing the child to really take control of their reading experience. 

In particular, the early childhood reading experience is slowly changing. What will under 7s expect from books when more and more of them use story apps? I think they might look for some of the fluidity and interactivity which exists in apps, particularly in playing around with story structure. And I think the key word in identifying their new experiences is probably choice. Choice is such a big part of apps, much more so than many physical picture books, allowing the child to really take control of their reading experience.

And so, feeling inspired and challenged by this, I've been working on an idea for a picture book (even a potential series, let's be ambitious!) which allows the reader to choose between several different paths to the end of the story. This is done brilliantly in apps like Nosy Crow's Little Red Riding Hood, which has several ways to reach Grandma's house, including different challenges and games along the way.

I've been having lots of fun with my story of a young, brave knight who sets out to save the princess, but who can take a number of different paths to get there, encountering dragons, jousting matches or hot air balloons depending which path he chooses. And when he's successful, he gets to choose his own reward. It's a big challenge to bring that non-linear storytelling back to the traditional picture book format, but I'm working on it!

Other potential future trends might include more picture books with puzzle-solving elements, a greater emphasis on dialogue (perhaps with technology allowing you to choose different conversation options?), and more links between paper books and apps.

Other potential future trends might include more picture books with puzzle-solving elements, a greater emphasis on dialogue (perhaps with technology allowing you to choose different conversation options?), and more links between paper books and apps. I don't just mean an electronic version of the same story bundled with a book, but an app which works alongside it, unlocking extra content. Perhaps a magic mirror could be persuaded to give up its secrets, for example, when the screen is held above it? I'm not sure whether these sorts of ideas are already trickling through, but I'll be very interested to see where trends lie in the next five to ten years.

I do think it is helpful for picture book writers to get to know the world of story apps, just like television, games or other media. If you haven't yet dipped your toe in these waters, I've shared a few of our favourites here.

App Store also now has a great Interactive Stories section making it much easier to find story apps than it used to be. So have a browse, and who knows, you may find some ideas to kick start your own stories!

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@aitcheldee @capptivatedkids

Helen Dineen is a Scottish picture book author and mum of two living on the south coast of England. She loves being part of her local Southampton SCBWI goal setting group. Helen is represented by the Anne Clark Literary Agency. She reviews apps for young children at http://capptivatedkids.wordpress.com and has been a Cybils Book App Judge.

Ten-Minute Blog Break - 9th September

I'm aware that the same names crop up fairly frequently on the Blog Break, so I'm going to try this week to highlight posts from bloggers who we haven't heard from in a while.


Larissa Villar Hauser hasn't blogged since April, so she definitely qualifies! It might appear sometimes that self-published authors simply empty the contents of their hard drives into Amazon Kindle Publishing, but Larissa has been taking a more measured approach, as she notes in her post.

What turns a great book into an obsessive read? Blogging at The Edge, Sara Grant gets Book Mania when she explores the books that she's loved over the last few years, and tries to determine why they mean so much to her.

I didn't have room last week for Katriona Chapman's blog for Big Little Tales, but luckily I've managed to squeeze it in this time. It's a post which provides quite the visual feast as it explores Great Book Cover Designs.

I enjoyed reading about John Shelley's triumphant return to Japan over the summer, and the two exhibitions of his work. Like his trip, John's post is "busy, inspiring and very encouraging."

My last selection is a bit of a cheat, because Olivia Kiernan actually got into last week's Blog Break with her vlog. But that was written as Olivia Bright, whereas this week she's blogged under her real name. More than that, her blog post on Writing and Coping with Rejection is so full of wisdom that I simply had to include it!

Nick.

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A SCBWI member since 2009, Nick Cross is an Undiscovered Voices winner who currently writes children's short fiction for Stew Magazine.

Nick's most recent blog post finds him looking away from despair, towards Higher Ground.