Time goes by so fast these days. You’ve got masses of work to do, e-mails to respond to, ads to write, your website needs tweaking – and there are just a couple of facts you want to check before sending off your new article to the various ezine databases. You haven’t got the right books at home, and you definitely haven’t got time to go to the library. You can probably find the information you need on the net, but it may take a while to track it down, and the search engines throw up a load of dross before taking you to anything really useful. It would be brilliant if you could just click a button on your computer for the information you need to appear on your screen.
The chances are that with Microsoft Encarta that will happen.
Encarta is of course only one of a number of digital and online encyclopaedias and information resources, but having worked on this product myself as a freelance editor and proofer – so that I’ve read a lot of the articles and other content in detail – I have no hestitation in saying that if you could only afford one reference work, this should be it. It’s a truly great product, fun and easy to use, very comprehensive – and immensely useful for anyone wanting quick and reliable access to quality information. There’s so much information’ – and misinformation – out there now, that what’s really important is the ability to discriminate, to know which sources of information to trust – and the Encarta writers and editors have done a lot of that work for you – not only by providing quality content within the product itself but also by continually searching out and evaluating the best internet sites relating to any particular topic.
The range of information is staggering, and it’s continually added to with monthly updates. Everything is here – from literature guides giving you the complete low-down on important works of literature to abstruse information about sports personalities, from details of parliamentary constituencies and boundary changes to the history of just about any country you care to mention. Battles, films, chemicals, inventions, minerals, anatomy, art history, architecture, World Heritage sites: you name it, it’s here and you can access the information you want, and see and hear multimedia presentations about it, at the click of a mouse. Encarta will help you write authoritatively about any topic you choose. (And the grammar’s pretty good too!)
Virginia Rounding is a published writer whose website of
Internet Resources for Writers looks at additional ways for
writers to earn money, in the hope of making it possible
for them to keep writing without having to resort either to
full-time employment or to destitution. For a selection of
free resources or to subscribe to her new ezine Poetry
Competition Updates, go to
http://www.virginiarounding.com/links.html
