Body Language in Literature

Body Language is a form of human non-verbal communication accomplished by a series of body postures, facial expressions and eye movements. We subconsciously know if someone is happy or sad, bored or excited, thrilled or sleepy just by looking at him. Even though an estimated 60-90% of all human communication consists of body language (verbal is only about 7%), we were ignorant of this language until the late 1960's when the first course appeared in an American university.

In spite of our academic ignorance, a number of professionals had managed to control their body language on a practical level for specific ends. Good actors for example, took the appropriate body postures and facial expressions to effectively communicate the feelings of the character they portrayed to their audience. Successful salesmen also used body language to gain the trust of their customers. So did swindlers and politicians. A good speaker knew when his audience was bored so that he could change his pace or his subject to reestablish the communication.

PureText and Other Free Goodies

We do it every day. We copy text from a document or a web page and paste it to another document for whatever reason. It's immediately apparent that the copied and the original text's fonts, their size, the line spacing and all the other goodies that determine how text appears on a page are all different. If we wish to incorporate the copied text to our present document form we must correct it. This is not a difficult process but if you do it a number of times you will become exasperated. Years ago you would have ripped the page off your typewriter, crumbled it and threw it into the trashcan. But in this age of computers crumbling laptops could prove awfully expensive. So what do you do?

"PuretText" is a tiny (28 kB!) computer program you may run in your Windows computer. It sits on your task bar. You copy anything you wish from anywhere and click the PT symbol on your task bar. This changes whatever is on your clipboard to pure text. When you now proceed to paste it to where you want it, presto! It immediately matches the form of the rest of your document. Life is good again. And like most good things in life, PureText is free (without any small print, advertising or what have you). Just visit the PureText home page above to learn to use it and download.