In today’s computer literate society, you get so used to some concepts like copy and paste that you start assuming everyone is familiar with the skills required. It becomes difficult to remember when it didn’t exist.

I think a post a few weeks ago by John Chow was a prime example of this. He was explaining about using a typewriter to write a letter and was asked “How do you copy and paste with that?”

So, for anyone how needs to know, here is a quick guide to copying text from a webpage and pasting it into a blog post. The details may vary slightly depending on the blogging software that you use, but the concept is the same. I will use my last post Book Meme as the example.

Find the text on the webpage that you want to use, in this case it was from sarabeth’s post Book Meme 2. Move your mouse to just before the text that you want to copy.

Press and hold the left mouse button, then drag the mouse pointer, which will have probably changed to look like a letter ‘I’, over the text that you want until it is all selected, then let go of the left mouse button.

At this point you either go to the Edit menu on your web-browser and select Copy or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL C (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter C, then let go of both). This copies the selection to the computer’s clipboard.

In your blogging software, choose the place in a post where you want to put the selected text and left click with your mouse in this place. Then either on the Edit menu choose Paste, or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL V (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter V, then release both).

This pastes the selection from the computer’s clipboard to the location that you selected.

After this you can reformat individual sections by selecting them and choosing Bold or Italic or changing the colour as required.

[Edited for spelling]