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On my commute to work, I sometimes take my laptop to do some writing. The other day I was sitting next to a man who just kept glancing over at the screen. It wasn’t that I was hiding anything in particular, in fact I was just typing a blog post, but it was a little annoying. I decided to change my font to the lightest grey that I could visibly see, which I was sure he couldn’t see. I could sense him turning his head a few times, but he soon stopped. He must have thought I was typing nothing. I had a bit of a giggle over it.
Today, I decided to google ‘hiding your writing’, and discovered a technical blog post Tech Tips for Writers #9 – Quickly hide your screen from Jacqui Murray’s WordDreams…. She advises pressing Alt+Tab to switch screens, which brings up the screen behind the one you are working on (it’s a trick I believe that most of us know!). Interestingly she writes that Alt+Tab is often used as a verb as in “I had to alt+tab when my manager appeared”.
Alternatively you could always try The Lingustic Mystics secret writing system called ‘Cryptorthography’. It’s apparently a made up name and a “combination of cryptos (Greek for ‘hidden’), and then the linguistics term ‘orthography’, referring to the writing system and writing rules of a language. ‘orthography’ also comes from Greek, being a combination of orthos (‘correct’) and graphein (‘to write’)”. Very clever…
Some other tips on the Linguistic Mystic site is to use steganography (a way to hiding writing within other information) or write with “disappearing invisible ink or ink that’s only exposed with certain light sources”. If you have the time to do that sort of things then that’s fine, but I think I’ll stick with changing the font to light grey for now!
Hope you enjoyed today’s blog.
Until tomorrow…
Sandra
Freelance Writer
www.sandramadeira.com
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How rude of that gentleman to keep staring at your work!
Those crypto-whatsit techniques seem a bit complicated, I prefer your one – changing the font colour. That’s clever. 🙂
Posted by Nisha | January 26, 2012, 9:00 amThanks Nisha 🙂
Posted by Sandra Madeira | January 26, 2012, 3:00 pm