Proofreading & Editing Blog For Students, Researchers, Business Professionals and Writers

Blesse or Blessay?

Having an idyllic weekend i.e. no kids, I was able to do all the man type stuff normally reserved for such rare times. Watch rugby, drink beer, wake up with a hangover at what ever time of the day I damn well please!

After chopping a ton of firewood I retired to my living room and the mansize TV and slapped on "The Longest Day". There is a line in the movie "Blesse mon couer avec une langeur monotone" and in English "Wound my heart with a monotonous langour". Blesse being the French word for wound (pronounce the last "e" as "ay" or in other words as you would Blessay.

Now Blessay is not in the English dictionary ... yet!

My television fare into the late hours was Stephen Fry's QI and as coincidence would have it, I had drifted over to his blog for a read as he is also one of my favourite authors. Blessay is Stephen's corruption of Blog and Essay to describe his blogging efforts. If he's using Blessay as a word, surely it can only be a matter of time before it finds its way into some Oxford type dictionary?

Essay or Blessay writing can be fun and simple to do. I write them virtually every day for my own amusement and to practice with a medium I think many writers employ as a development arena for good ideas.

Here is a summary of Supaproofread's advice on writing essays and you can find the full info on their site here:

• Plan your work early - I think this is aimed at essay writers who are students working to assignments but I also find it applies when I have an idea; ideas zip around at neural speed so write it down as soon as you can before you lose it;
• Understand the question - my old law lecturer and I still meet up for the occasional brain cell hammering session and I mention him as he used to write "RTFQ" quite a lot on my papers - RTFQ stands for "Read The F*****g Question!" - if in doubt ask for clarification before you head off in the wrong direction;
• Organise your Research & Thoughts - again writing your ideas and reference materials down on a blank piece of paper will help you get everything into perspective and visualise how the essay will flow from point to point - I use a blank sheet of paper regularly and you will find me carrying around a hardback A4 notebook just for this purpose;
• Short is Sweet - unless your name is Stephen Fry, don't use a long word when a short one will do. If you are familiar with a word and understand its application in your particular context, that's fine but otherwise you are on a slippery slope which only results in loss of credibility and a poor reception for your work; and
• Stay On Topic - this is my own opinion, and it may seem obvious but veering away from topic is anaethema unless the direction you take is a logical extension of the ideas that have been developed and presented earlier. Sentences are units of sense, paragraphs also as they develop an idea which flows into the next while the essay stands as a coherent piece presenting your ideas as a unified whole - going off at a tangent is something reserved for geniuses or for your own fun so stick to your brief.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

I spend a fair amount of time with my children's school helping out when I can. I was recently asked to talk to my son's class as part of a "bring your parent in so the little brats darlings can grill them" exercise.

"What job do you do?" was one of several eager questions thrown at me to which I foolishly replied "I write for a living." Immediately, there were moans and groans, the spotty oik with the earring exclaimed "BORING!" and Ms F, the young school teacher with the ink not quite dry on her PGCE, suddenly took a closer interest in me which was not a bad thing.

My son looked like he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him having fed his school chums on stories of Dad jumping out of planes, landing in a greenhouse in Holland and shooting a monkey with a grenade launcher while liberating the Falklands single handed. Right now I was blowing these myths out of the water and ruining his promo work by telling his mates I was something really boring like a "writer"?

"Better think of something quick sunshine," I thought to myself, "the natives are distinctly restless!"

Get A Freelancer

I posted a short while ago on a commission I won for a PowerPoint presentation for a business competition and fund raising exercise that needed to be undertaken in English with foreign owners at the helm of the company.

This was Get A Freelancer or GAF as it is more commonly known by users.

I've used GAF for about 6 months now and it is a great source of projects to bid on in order to generate some work. You'll find all forms of online content being requested by project providers and the entry level is as low as you will need the bar to be in order to be able to compete. If you have been following my posts here at Supaproofread but have not yet taken the plunge, here is your chance to get your hands dirty and become a professional scribbler.

GAF has a simple and straight forward registration process, you do not need a credit card and it is free to join though I do pay $12 per month to get access to juicier projects (that's about £6). As a virgin writer you don't need to worry about that.

Set up a PayPal account in anticipation of being paid - again simple to do and it will ease any issues with receiving funds. Just follow the hyperlink and note, you will need a credit or debit card to register but again it is free to join.

Once you have completed the registration process you need to set up your profile. You will see a lot of terms that may have absolutely no meaning to you such as SEO, Python, ASP, .NET and so on however you need not be in the least concerned about them. I set the GAF site to notify me by email of projects that I may be interested in and to do this create your profile when you register. Here's mine:

User Profile
Username:	ERH
Name/Company:	ERH
Country:	United States
City:	Bradenton
Area of Expertise:	Web Promotion SEO Proofreading Market Research Link Building Copywriting
Average Pricing:	$20/hour
Profile:
Rating:	(9 reviews)
Member Since:	04-21-2007 10:45
Skills:	Blogger SEO Content English spoken as a 1st language
Vision:	Donate Pecunias Liberi Viarum
Keywords:

If you restrict yourself to copywriting until you have some experience launching off elsewhere this will ensure you are focused on projects that you have a decent chance of winning. Your profile once created will automatically set up an email notification that can be managed and will let you know whenever a project is filed under your criteria. Personally, I receive between 5 and 10 emails from GAF each day and I scan them every evening.

Be a Control Freak with TCP

I've been caught on the hop with recent developments as work seems to have stepped up a gear both in terms of volume and the quality.

I've missed deadlines; a cardinal writing sin!

There is no-one else responsible, it's me and frankly, I just was not prepared so immersed have I become in attracting business, dealing with existing customers and getting the job done that I have not seen the wood for the trees.

That stops today or I won't have a business left and one step forward is pointless if it results in two steps back.

So aggressive have I become at sorting out business affairs and dealing with workload issues that the delightful little darlings, heir and spare, have been packed off to mother for the week and the phone is off the hook.

Now I'm a dab hand at getting to grips with admin and weeding out the important from the immaterial trivia that collects with your business dealings; a hangover from my days being Chief Chimp of my own outfit. This may not be the case with you and artists rarely have a sense of the importance of paper from a business perspective, so here is some TCP to help you stay on top of things before you have a mini crisis.

TCP = Time, Client & Paper

Time Management

Invest in a good diary - preferably a page a day one so you can plan your day and your week. If you can be organised and disciplined, plot out when you are going to work on each commission. Leave spaces floating in the diary for "last minute" jobs and also make sure you allocate time for performing your admin.

Update on Writing in the Real World

A couple of weeks ago I posted that I was going to start experimenting with finding work in the real publishing world rather than just for online consumption. I bought a couple of books to help me, one being The Writers Handbook and the other The Freelance Writer's Guide by Andrew Croft.

I cannot report success at this time but there has been a development.

I used the Writers Handbook to find a list of the Sunday papers and called several up with an idea for a story. The story deals with international child abduction and the treatment of children and their familes that are caught up in this increasingly common situation.

This was my very brief outline mailed and emailed to the contacts selected:

"This week the British courts will send British citizens to foreign jurisdictions for court hearings. These British citizens will have committed no crime, many will have been born here and many will have lived here for most if not all of their lives. In 1980, Britain signed an international treaty which has resulted in several thousand children being sent abroad for court hearings. Some have died as a result, many have been abused and hundreds have simply disappeared while foreign civil servants have been implicated in serious misuse of the treaty to aid their own nationals escape repercussions of their actions towards British children.

Drowning Street

Well this has been quite a week for me. It is a constant source of amazement how quickly life can change with only miniscule step changes.

I was commissioned to put together a PowerPoint presentation by a client who had been invited to enter his company into a company/business IT competition - think "Dragons Den" and you have some idea. Specifically, I had to run a broad brush Venture Capital presentation as part of a request for 6 million euro, produce some supporting graphs and a series of key features with summaries of the business, its market, competition, strengths and weaknesses.

Again this may not sound too much like writing however it was in reality; the client had already done all the research and needed someone with a good grasp of English to put a business class English language presentation together which for them was difficult. The difficulty was the MD was Swedish with the co-owner Ukrainian, and though both had very good English when I spoke with them, it became painfully clear that English writing quality was not a strength in their corporate armoury.

For approximately one day, I received $900 and a further commission worth substantially in excess of that.

The Freelance Writers Handbook

Andrew Crofts Take on How to Make Money and Enjoy Your Life

I posted a couple of weeks ago that I was going to conduct a real time experiment and report back on my progress in becoming a real world published writer. So far you'll only find my work online unless you look for some very obscure tracts written years ago while working as an accountant and dealing with the 1989 budget..and don't we remember that well !

I am pleased to say that I have taken delivery of Andrew Crofts "The freelance writer's handbook" and have read most of it by now. My impressions are that the first half of the book is great, very useful and to be honest it has served more to reinforce my own ideas of how to go about dealing with writing practicalities, rather than provide much in the way of innovation or insight. The second half of the book starts dealing with some of the more detailed aspects of the profession and speciality areas such as writing for children or ghostwriting. You can pretty much skip through this lot unless you have a need for it.