Right your Congressperson the Write Way! by Don Rittner Have you ever wanted to write a letter to a Congressperson, business leader, or official about your displeasure over an environmental vote, decision, or policy, but didn't have the person's name and address or time to track it down? Well, if you own a personal computer and printer Speak Out Software has taken the mechanical drudgery away and given you the tools to express yourself easily - and often. They have published Speak Out, a unique menu driven word processing software program that contains over 3000 names of top public officials along with their titles, addresses, and phone numbers. This easy to use interactive program lets you write one or several letters, addresses them, and prints the letter, envelope, or label for you automatically. Speak Out gives you complete control over the writing process allowing you the task of concentrating on what you want to say. You can create or edit letters and save them for future use. When a letter is first created, the user enters a title or reference for the letter that is stored for easy recall later. Once the body of the text is typed the program will print it with or without the user's name and address in the body of the letter. Also, the user can easily set up the program to print labels, and/or envelopes printed with or without his/her name and address on it. The program comes with some guidelines for effective letter writing and a couple of sample letters. The master directory contains thousands of names to choose from and is broken down into five categories: United States; International; State & Local; Other; and, By Last Name. >The United States category comprises seven lists: the U.S. House of Representatives; Senate; Executive branches, departments and agencies; Supreme Court; Governors for all fifty states; Mayors of the top 100 cities, and Fortune 200 companies. Each category has the name, address, title, and phone number. >Have an international beef? The International category is broken down into Foreign Countries; the United Nations; International organizations (like the Central American Common Market or European Free Trade Association, for example ); Foreign Embassies in the United States; and United States Embassies in Foreign Countries. >The State and Local category lists the user's home State's House of Representatives, Senators, government agencies like the Attorney Generals office, and has a local government category that can be filled in using a built in template. >The "Other" category is a catch-all for the user to fill in with their own categories using a built in template. >Finally, the last category "By Last Name," allows the user to conduct a search of the entire database using a last name as the criteria. The database searches for the name or close facsimile. Future versions will allow keyword searching (e.g. find all agencies with the word "Environment"). Annual updates of the master directory are available for a small fee and will keep your database accurate. During the entire perusal of the database the user has the option to tag names which will, when prompted, print all of the tagged items as labels, envelopes, or letters - or all three. Once printing is finished, the user can untagged the items. Help is always available using your F1 key. Speak Out has to be one of this year's most important pieces of software. Individuals, political action committees, environmental organizations, and special interest groups will find Speak Out a valuable tool for making their views known. This program is so easy to use one could churn out hundreds of letters in one day if you wish! One thing is for certain, you no longer have an excuse not to write that letter to your congressperson. Rating: 4.7 (5.0 being the highest) User Friendly: 4.8 Significant Environmental Value: 4.5 Educational Value: 4.8 Source: Speak Out Software, P.O. Box 272705, Houston, TX 77277. (800) 43-SPEAK; (713) 664-1005. Cost: $49.95 plus $2 shipping. Requirements. IBM PC/XT/AT/PS2 or compatible with minimum 512K ram. One or two floppy drives (5 1/4" or 3 1/2"). Both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks are supplied. DOS 2.0 or later. A Macintosh version is in the works. Copyright 1991, Don Rittner -------------- Don Rittner is the author of EcoLinking: Everyone's Guide to Online Information (Peachpit Press), a columnist for Environment News Service, and Host of America Online's Environmental Forum.