A Note on Payments...

I know you make this face when your check arrives...

Many of you have brought up suggestions for our payment process. These ideas have included payment tracking, direct deposits, more lenient cut-off dates, weekly payments, and so on. While we love to hear your ideas and suggestions (and we do read every one), these decisions are ultimately made by our finance team.

We unfortunately have very little control over the process, but we do have a great in-house finance team, and they make sure that we're doing everything by the book and not breaking any laws or making anyone angry. One of the main laws that dictate how we process payments is that there must be a temporary hold placed on your payments. For contractors, this hold is "net 15", which means we can't send out the checks until 15 days after a check request is sent (that's what we do on the last Friday of the month). We're lucky that we were able to get this down from the typical "net 30" hold.

We wish it was as simple as pressing a button on PayPal or Venmo and depositing money into your checking account immediately, but there are many regulations in place that we must adhere to. We're doing our best because we know you're giving us your all!

With that said, I will be creating a quick calendar of payment dates to remember for 2013.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and a very happy new year!

Templates: The Secret to Writing Quick, Quality Solutions

One of the most effective ways to write quick, high-quality solutions is to create your own template for your work and fill it in with each subsequent problem. We've spoken to our most efficient and highest-scoring authors, and they've all said that they do some variation of this. Maybe the bulk of the solution cannot be cloned, but at least you can have ready the key elements of a solution and duplicate them over again to maintain consistency and quality overall. But first, what are these key elements of a good solution? We need to know that first and create the skeleton of the solution in each template.

Key Elements of a High-Quality Textbook Solution:

1. Introductory sentence. This can be short and just sums up what is being asked in your own words. This gives your solution a clear direction. 
2. If needed, a diagram to set up the problem. Point out the relevant areas in the diagram and label with Times New Roman size 12 font.
3. Set-up problem-solving tactic. Briefly describe how you plan to work through the problem. The textbook you're working from may specify a specific procedure. Make sure you review the worked out solutions in the book. 
4. Individual steps separated by delimiters (single lines). Steps should be direct and not get off track. You don't want to confuse students with unnecessary information. 
5. A conclusion that re-states the answer in a full sentence. 
6. A box around the final numerical answer. See how to do that in our blog post on the subject.

So you can see that you could easily have a template at-ready with your heading setup, delimiters in place, and a general introductory sentence in place. Once you have one top-quality solution, why not duplicate that quality over and again?

We highly recommend you create your own template that fits your style and your text. But to get you started, we'll link you to some of the best solutions we've seen in physics, statistics, engineering, and business. If you find these helpful and want to see more, just email me or Ryan. We'll be happy to set you up with templates. We may even have one for the book you're working on! Imagine all the time saved! Imagine all the money earned! 

• A Business Template (This is for a matching problem and can be used for any discipline): Here. 
• Several Engineering Templates in One Word Document: Here. 
• A Physics Template: Here. 
• A Statistics Template: Here. 
• A few levels of math templates can be found in another blog post: Here.

What's Your Solution Authoring Strategy?

We hope you're not using a typewriter...

As some of you may know, we've been working hard to improve the quality of our engineering solutions authoring program. We actually conducted a short survey for our engineering authors about six weeks ago, and we learned all kinds of tactics and approaches that some of you take to tackle the problems assigned to you. 

We were so impressed by some of the feedback that we've decided to share it with everyone here. Read on for tips and tricks, and then share your strategies in the comments! If you work differently, we'd love to hear how you attack the difficult stuff.

Best free program for creating diagrams:

• DrawPlus (http://www.serif.com/free-graphic-design-software/). Once you are familiar with how to use this program, it becomes very easy to use. Our authors say it is just as useful as CorelDraw.
• For geometry, try Geogebra.

Best way to approach problem-solving:

1. Solve on paper first quickly, grouping similar problems so that you can concentrate on one topic/equation/method at once (if you need to explain these concepts more than once, you can even copy-paste your descriptions).
2. Then begin to create any helpful diagrams you need. If a problem does not require that you manipulate the diagram at all, save time by referring to the diagram in the text. Say something like, “See the diagram of the pulley-system with a length of 5 ft. and…”. Do not refer to page numbers, figure numbers, or problem numbers, as these change from edition to edition while many of the problems remain the same.
3. Finally, begin typing up the solutions.
4. Save time by creating a universal introduction template and/or filling in the blanks in a template for similar problems.
5. Start by inputting just the MathType equations, and then decide the best places to add in student-friendly explanations. Place delimiters (steps) before each short written explanation.  
6. Never include more than 4 lines of MathType. Instead, break up these lines and add written explanation between them, separating each step with delimiters.
7. Always box the final numeric answer.

Some tactics from our authors that help them work more quickly:

• Derive on scratch paper before typing.
• Try to use the best suited equation for given parameters of the problem.
• If the problem is very simple, don’t use scratch paper! Instead, type directly in order to minimize the time it takes to write the problem.
• For harder problems, quickly solve the solution on paper first and then transfer to Word.
• Verify the final answer with the available software that you have.
• Work on one section or topic at a time.
• Type the solutions in the same section on the same day so your brain is all warmed up for that particular type of problem, rather than typing one problem a day.
• Spend time creating meaningful diagrams and sketches, because they help to make the solution easier to understand for the student. This initial time investment will also save you from getting sent back solutions and having to create them all over again.
• Provide a logical order to the solution process so that the reasoning behind the solution is easy to follow.
• Break up lengthy solutions into logical, modular segments, in a similar fashion as writing very lengthy software. This makes it easy to review the solution and to spot mistakes.