No pop metaphysical descriptions here on the life of a rake, my son is too young to really appreciate the humour and pathos in Alfie but he put me on the spot during half-term with some rebellious comments on homework.

“Why do I have to write good stuff anyway Dad?”

At the time I was busy with the hectic shuffling that ocurrs around dinner time so my initial response was along the lines of “Because I’m your Dad and I say so, now just get it done!”

During dinner, we talked about this a little more not least as #1 heir was in something of a strop over why he had to do some homework when his younger sister did not.

As I’m increasingly learning, the questions I get from my offspring are rarely less than thought provoking. I can picture my nan in heaven looking down with a knowing smirk on her face and thinking how poetic justice is particularly after all the grief I gave her when I was a sprog.

So, why bother with good writing?

I think at least part of the answer lies with what writing is. In the absence of telepathy for mind to mind transfer, writing is the substitute for transferring ideas from your mind to someone else. It follows logically that writing is a reflection of your thoughts and thinking processes that have created them.

Poor thinking and an inability to organise your thoughts is nothing more than laziness. Thought organisation requires practice to perfect and sloppy organisation demonstrates laziness and childishness. Bluntly, if you don’t arrange your own thoughts into some sense of order this will be expressed in your writing.

Poor writing is a reflection of poor thinking and represents childish and unprofessional qualities.

If you wish to be considered as childish (and I am thinking of some of the “ickle, lickle babee talk” that populates some of the dating sites I’ve been lurking on recently) then good writing does not matter.

If you do not wish to appear as professional, someone who is in control and understands their subject matter in depth, then good writing does not matter.

If you do not wish to be able to communicate exactly what you are thinking, including what you want or desire, then good writing does not matter.

After heading off pre-teenage rebellion at the pass, I asked my son to start thinking about not only what he’s going to be asking from Santa this year but how he’s going to ask. My thinking was to give my lad some motivation in the right direction:
“Do you want Santa to understand exactly what you are asking for and why, or run the risk of Santa getting confused and bringing the wrong stuff?”

Looking me fully in the eye, sprog maximus says:

“Now you’re the one being a kid Dad, we know you’re the one that brings the presents!”

Looks like I’ve been rumbled on that one Alfie!

Bookmark, Share or Email this article

“Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle and could drink you under the table.”

Monty Python

Brainstorming new ideas for scribbling is a key part of the composition process. In a practical sense, brainstorming is essential when you have a commission to produce 40 articles on the same topic and by the time you’ve gotten to the 10th you’ll be scraping the barrel for off the top of your head approaches.

Now personally, if I drink I know perfectly well that there is an answer lying at the bottom of the bottle, it’s just I’ve always been too drunk to read it and certainly never rememebered anything the morning after.

Aristotle, if Monty Python are correct, certainly was able to read the answer because he came up with an excellent summary for brainstorming that is as relevant today as it was a couple of thousand years ago when he wrote about Rhetoric.

Braoadly he came up with five main ideas to use:

• Definition
• Comparison and Contrast
• Relationship
• Testimony
• Circumstance

I’m going to cover definition here in this posting but we’ll come to the others in future postings.

Definition

For a definition you can simply reach for a decent dictionary but there are other ways you can approach determining a definition by asking questions about what something is and how it interacts.

For instance:

• What family does X belong to?
• How is X different from A, B, C or Z?
• What is X made of?
• Has X changed over time?
  
• What words are similar to X?

Practically, answering questions like this will help you identify clearly what X is, and also what it is not. We are using here principles of rhetoric laid down by Aristotle that include the use of analogy, analysis, etymology and history, as well as illustration and antonymy (demonstrating what something is NOT).

Moving forward, to the practical application in writing and taking the example questions above and inserting some real life substitutions for X we can brainstorm a little.

“What family does X belong to?”

Here let’s substitute X for Propecia - a popular hair loss treatment so our question becomes “What family does propecia belong to?”

The blank piece of paper I use for ideas will start looking something like this:

Propecia belongs to a family of drugs that treat hair loss - what are the others - Minoxidil/Rogaine/ScalpMed/finasterides

Propecia is FDA registered - what others are? - Minoxidil/Laser Comb nb. this is not a drug

Propecia is prescription only medication - what else is - Minoxidil

“How is X different from A, B, C or Z?”

How is propecia different from Minoxidil - P is a tablet, M is a solution - P outsells M commercially - P is suitable for women M application is restricted with women nb. pregnancy warning/side effects

P is prescription only - lasercomb/rogaine/scalpmed are not

P has the largest number of clinical studies of any hair loss treatment in the world - clinical evidence points to P as the best

“What is X made of?”

P is product of 1950’s drug research into blood pressure and testosterone induced male conditions such as prostrate and bladder problems - P is a vascular drug - known as an androgenic inhibitor/regulator

Now I’m going to stop my brainstorming there, but it is simple to see that asking Definition type questions is a way of carving up a topic and generating ideas for writing about it.

Bookmark, Share or Email this article

Seems there haven’t been any of the posts go live for over week, and to all our RSS readers I do apologise. It was my fault entirely (bit of a control freak) as I’ve been sidetracked to other ‘goings on’ through the business and marketing aspects of the main Supaproofread.com site, and ‘thought’ I’d posted the blog posts but I’d actually kept them as drafts (duh!). As I’ve been managing the day to day activities of the company as well as communicating with editorial staff on how the site can be improved I didn’t realise there was a problem, but everything should be ‘hunky dory’ from now on.

In addition, I’ve launched a new blog information and resource site for students and academics who are studying at college/university - www.road2graduation.com. It’s been a good step in the right direction for me and I’ve already prepped my posts for the next 3 months. If you’re interested in this arena I’d advise you to subscribe to the R2G’s RSS feed, as I hope to develop the blog to become a well known resource in 2008/9.

Not wanting to draw you away too much from the actual title, here is an update of the postings that didn’t get posted until yesterday:

A word Called IT

This is a non smoking office or is it?

Irenooshka to the rescue

Blesse or Blessay?

Monday, Monday

Once again, apologies and don’t forget to checkout the Road 2 Graduation blog.

Bookmark, Share or Email this article

I’ve written several eBooks of varying length and varying topics. They can be brilliant excursions into a topic that holds you or they can be a complete pain in the B-hind. They also don’t tend to pay so well in my opinion but as a relative novice to the market, I haven’t gotten enough eBooks under my belt to command the rises in fee that my shorter works seem to be getting…or maybe that’s just a confidence thing with me.

I’m scoping out a project which is a personal one, indeed a deeply personal matter which I sincerely believe needs to be told.

The medium I have chosen to put this story together with is an eBook.

eBooks are cheap to produce and to prepare and this probably accounts for the huge number of works that are produced. As a ghost writer of some of these dubious works, I’ve been paid anything between $150 to $1,000 for works ranging in size from 10,000 to 25,000 words. Given that an advertisement in a local paper can cost a business anything from £30 for a small inch by inch box on tomorrows fish and chip wrapper and in this light, paying £100 is chicken feed for something someone can put their own name on and claim as their own.

If you wish to promote yourself as an “expert” on anything, write about it and even better, write a book on it.

An eBook gives you a great deal of kudos out of all proportion to what actually goes into it. This is why it is very common to see free eBook giveaways on web sites as they are a very powerful marketing tool in establishing credibility very cheaply.

Like any other piece of work, you need to plan it out and research your subject matter. The time required is going to increase substantially if you are to do this properly compared to writing a series of articles running along the same theme.  You’ll need to take this into account when considering delivery times for yourself or your client.

Structure takes a greater significance with eBook writing and here’s why I think that is.

A friend of mine is currently getting crispy with the fires in California but when he’s not putting out fires, he’s a writer/director/actor with some decent credits to his name. My sprogs think he’s “Da Bomb” because he played a Klingon in the Star Trek The Next Generation series but he’s also handled film.  Josef believes that while film making is exciting because you have the kudos associated with putting a film in the can, he prefers a series when dealing with more interesting subject matter. With film, you get 90 minutes to tell your story but with a series (or season as he calls them) you get 60 minutes to deal with a chapter and typically 12 episodes to tell the complete story.

So, if you have 1,000 words to tell the story of Hoodia Gordonii then you are going to have to gloss over the interesting bits of the story and focus on what it does and why the reader should buy it. If you get 10,000 words to tell the Hoodia story you can cover what it is, who first used it, how the discovery was brought to the west, the effect it has and the problems it may solve and the problems it may create, how this has affected the indigenous people who control it…

The main issue to address is identifying the salient points of your story around which the chapters will form themselves and organising them sequentially so, just as paragraphs should flow one to the next, so do the chapters.  This does not mean that you have to write in a sequential order and frequently I write the last chapter first and work towards it.

Writing an eBook takes more time than keybashing out 40 articles on Thailand or whatever the topic is. I find I need to plan my writing time in a more structured way in order not to become stale with the subject matter and to avoid running into that scribbling brick wall known as writers block.  That does not mean to say that when the juices are flowing I don’t get stuck in because I do but tackling 30,000 words is not something you do in leap and a bound. You really need to discipline yourself far more than churning out the odd article for mass consumption.

Publishing an eBook is pretty simple stuff. Simply convert your completed document to a PDF format and there you have it. You need to be sure of the layout, though I rarely use pictures unless the client instructs otherwise and make sure the work is proofed and edited before conversion. One tip for all the Microsoft Word users; I have found that performing the PDF conversion from MS Word leads to some formatting errors in the completed product. An easy way to get around this is to write your eBooks using Open Office which is a free download and provides you with all the functionality of Word and MS Office (I use it almost exclusively now). Converting an Open Office document to a PDF seems to avoid all the nasty little problems with spacing, unwanted character insertions and so on that I experienced with Word. You can find the download here at www.openoffice.org and as I said, it is completely free and gives a Microsoft office experience without the price tag or problems.

Now you have the eBook produced what are you going to do with it?

Most of the time that will be a question for your client who has commissioned the piece and honestly, I have not a clue yet as to how I will market my own work. Perhaps that is a topic for a future posting.

Bookmark, Share or Email this article

Well here we are again - Mondays are great as far as I’m concerned as yet another week beckons and though it’s half-term the sprogs are pitch and putting with mum. It may be a damp day outside but the dogs are walked and I’ve already chucked 7,000 words into the PC and having my post-fresh air cup of Earl Grey. No fags though as I quite 6 weeks ago - “Yay!” for me.

I have been appointed as editor of a military website operating out of San Diego, California. The subject matter is slightly more interesting to me as I’m a former soldier, but what I’m finding more interesting than any of the content is the variation in presentation and writing style and the visible effects that is happening on the traffic both to and within the site.

Clive has posted up on some of the issue surrounding writing for the web and I’m going to add my opinion on this too. Supaproofread has a link to an article by Jakob Nielsen which you really should read as it contains some extremely good advice, and the most important point to grasp is that web surfers rarely read what you write, rather they scan it in a matter of seconds before moving on…unless you grab and hold their attention.

Web readers scan rather than read word by word what is on a web page - email readers are even more brutal in scanning content, rarely getting past the email header. For you as a web content provider, you have a very difficult job ahead which is to attract the surfer’s attention and hold it while you get your message over.

Here are some tips to help you achieve this:

• Highlighting - including hyperlinks will automatically provide a form of eye-catching highlighting but make liberal use of bold and italic typefaces as well resizing fonts as necessary;
• Headlines, Headers and Sub-Headers - use your headers and sub-headers in a meaningful way; ask yourself will your header get the reader to read the first line of the piece? Do your sub-headers transmit the jist of the content and allow the reader to make a decision on whether to stay or move on? They are not going to hang around if they are not sure, on average you have 5 to 7 seconds to pursuade someone to read what you’re presenting;
• One Paragraph = One Idea - paragraphs should encapsulate an idea and lead on as they develop ideas already presented in a piece; be concise and use the rule: 1 paragraph presents 1 idea;
• Word Count - half the word count is suggested as being appropriate for web content when comparing a piece to conventional written presentation. Surfers are turned off by marketing language which tends to be florid and takes 10 words when 1 will do, however there is a caveat here. Some web content is not aimed at being read by humans but is there to help with search engine rankings as part of a SEO exercise to get higher search engine rankings, this makes it important that you know who your primary target audience are; and
• Lists & Bullet Points - just like this one; they convey succinctly and concisely in an easily scanned format what you are wittering on about.

When you are planning and reviewing web content work it pays to keep in mind the surfing habits of the target audience as well as checking for typos and grammar errors when you are proofing the piece after drafting. My anecdotal experience is that surfers are staying on pages that have adopted these rules for more than ten times the amount of time spent on “conventionally” presented written content. That means increased sales and money for my principal, and incidentally, for me!

Bookmark, Share or Email this article