The Writer’s Journey
I remember the first thing I wrote. It was when I was about six years old. I wrote a poem about people slipping on banana peels and oil slicks. It was called “Slick Move” and it launched my writing career.
I’ve written all my life. With everything I was doing throughout my life, I was always a writer first. Throughout middle high and high school, I wrote short stories and poems. I tried writing a book, but it was a short story at best. My attention span couldn’t last long enough to write a complete three hundred page novel.
When I joined the Marine Corps right after high school, I wrote the entire time. I made general observations of different sights I saw. I kept snap shots of my life in the Marine Corps and they’re still lying around somewhere waiting to be put together in some kind of fashion.
Strunk & White – The Elements of Style
In my quieter moments I surf the internet just like anyone else involved primarily in writing web content. I regularly read CopyBlogger which is a mine of writing tips and resources, but I particularly picked up on a post by Brian Clark
bemoaning the adverse comments scattered about blog posts by English usage Nazi's. I think he has a fair set of points but they are not the subject of this post here. Brian was posting about common errors and by all means read his post, I thoroughly enjoy his blogging but bear in mind this is American writing and grammatical tips.
I followed through the post and picked up on a couple of names - Strunk & White - and clicking on the hyperlink, there we go through to Wikipedia and the entry for their tome. Reading the Wikipedia entry has motivated me to purchase a copy through eBay not least because of the simple, straight-forward advice that Messrs. Strunk & White appear to be dishing out.
Cooking for Writers: A Recipe for a Great Paper
Writing for a writer becomes a habitual process where the flow comes and just gets rolling. Pages and pages full of words course from our brains and through our hands in no time at all. It’s like giving a knife to a cook. The meal doesn’t take long at all to be ready.
Staying with the cooking analogy, someone who doesn’t know how to cook stands dumbfounded looking at ingredients and wondering what to do with them all. The same happens with someone who isn’t very familiar with the writing process. Thoughts are streaming through your brain, but you can’t get them out on the page. You can’t get them started.
Writing shouldn’t be as difficult as most people think. If you can talk to your friends, you can write. You’ve learned enough to start what you want to say, say what you want to say and sometimes you even get a chance to wrap up what you want to say. All you have to learn now is how to get it down on paper.
Just Begin
What stops most people from writing is getting started. How to begin is the question. Don’t look for some dramatic way to begin your document whether it’s an essay for college or an article for a magazine. Just begin.
What is the point of your paper? Start with a sentence that pinpoints the answer to that question and then go for it. Write the first paragraph with supporting sentences. Write your paper with supporting paragraphs and then, wrap it up in a nice little conclusion. Now, you can go back to the beginning and go for a more impressive, dramatic introduction if you want.
5 Tips for Writing with Persuasion
My bread and butter is writing sales copy or at least promotional copy of some description and that accounts for the vast majority of the demand in the market for scribblers today.
It makes sense to pick up on some techniques for writing in a persusive fashion - it makes no sense to write something that will not help sell or promote the product or service of your commissioning client.
#1 - Repetition
Repeating yourself helps get the point home to your audience. My view is to make your point in several different ways in order to avoid the appearance of treating your audience as if they are brainless. To this end I use quotes extensively both from individuals or from trusted reporting sources e.g. I quoted the "BBC" and "Angelina Jolie" when I wrote about Hoodia, a diet pill.
#2 - Consistency
Keep yourself on-message and on-topic. This will help you maintain a consistent approach to generating copy and advancing your message.
I tend to use this by advancing a position that a reader will find hard to disagree with and then following up with supporting evidence that leads to a hopefully, inescapable conclusion e.g. smokers die younger than non-smokers is a hard to disagree with statement.
#3 - Social Proof - Peer Pressure
I was told once upon a time that "The trend is your friend" and though this was in the context of foreign exchange dealing as traders would look for market trends in order to judge when to make trades, it has direct relevance with our writing as well.
I look for testimonials that can be cited and especially valuable are the rich and famous who use a product or service. You only need look at those companies that bear the Royal "By Appointment" signs to understand the significance of this.
The Name’s Bond, James Bond…..
Being Something I'm Not
Cue music, lights, camera and....ACTION !
Actually... errm ... not really.
In real life I'm not exactly James Bond material, though I've had some moments when On Her Majesty's Service; however, my days of jumping out of planes and looking like Action Man ended 20 years and 3 stones ago.
What has any of this got to do with writing ?
The answer is simple; when you're writing you are going to end up with projects requiring sentiments and style that are simply not you, so how can you pull that off?
A case in point has come my way this week with the usual cut and thrust of bidding for projects and winning enough to pay for the roof over our heads. One of the projects that ERH has won is a 10,000 mini eBook on the art of seduction, but in truth, it's a rerun of the many tones out there on how to get a shag if you're a sad geezer.
Why should you critique your own writing?
Writing gives a two dimensional structure a three dimensional look. It creates visuals in the mind of your readers. It gives some form to a non-existent structure. Once put down in print, you have actually captured and contained it. Your idea has been made presentable. The more you do it, the more you are able to do it and it thus becomes easier for you to churn out writings and express yourself through words. Use words that you have learned in your mind to express your ideas. You really don't have to wait until you learn the perfect words. The words that you have right now are enough; one can always refine everything later.
You should allow your writing to be free flowing. You should not stop yourself from putting whatever you are thinking into writing. Just write down whatever thoughts come into your mind about the subject. Make notes. Jot down all your ideas and phrases as they occur to you, and as an open minded writer, you should always keep a pad where you can write down notes where ever you go. It’s much easier to build upon existing material than it is to create it from nothing. Editing can always be done and refined later. You will generally find that you have an abundance of things to write about when you plan things this way.
Writers Block
I first encountered writers block when I had to deliver a set of twenty 300 word reviews on 2007 model cars sold in America. The word count was not large though I'm no car buff so a little research was in order.
It struck me just how similar car reviews were and it made no difference if the reviews were of different makes and models. There is not a lot you can write about changes from the Aston Martin DB7 to the Cherokee Jeep to the Smart car! Don't take my word for it, take a look yourself at car reviews and you will see that they are all extremely similar.
Unless you are actually going to take a car out for a spin, you are well and truly stuck with using reviews and writings that already exists for the model. Embellishment is superfluous as you'll only be embellishing someone else's embellishment in turn.
My principal asked me how the work was going and I responded "It's like eating cardboard!" - I really had a problem getting 300 words out for each of the twenty models that I'd been given. I'm a fairly self-disciplined kind of chap and stayed stuck to the keyboard trying to concentrate and get the work bashed out. Honestly, it drove me to distraction and took an age to complete.
Non-Fiction Writing: The Sins You Cannot Commit
One of the first mistakes that you have to look out for is the organization of your entire material. What is important here is that you are taking your readers on a trip through "the structure" - the beginning, middle and the end, if the reader cannot follow your reasoning and content, they will eventually give up. No one is going to have the patience to reading something that doesn’t make a lot of sense or interest them. We can't go on rambling now, can we?
To keep the attention of readers your use of the vocabulary is very important. A book is a two-dimensional medium, so it is up to the writer to deliver the words and to paint a picture that becomes three-dimensional in the reader's mind; this is true even for a non-fictional book. Uninteresting words make you lose focus whilst reading the book, so your writing has to be cohesive and structured. The two most important better writing skills are the ability to begin your writing well, and to conclude it even better - lucidity of thought and expression is also very important.
Poor sentence structure and grammar, misspellings, incorrect abbreviations and capitalizationall need to be reviewed, and if you make mistakes here, the reader may assume that your idea has errors too. The best way of making your writing an interesting read is by editing them over and over again until you are entirely satisfied with your work. Spending as much time as possible revising your work is a good idea. Once the first draft is complete, you'll come to the most dreaded part many writers dislike in their writing, proofreading and revising your work.
BOOK REVIEW: The Questions that One Needs to Answer
An analytical or critical review of a book is not essentially its summary. It is a description and an evaluation on the quality and significance of the book, in light of specific issues and theoretical concerns. It should focus on the book's purpose, content, and authority. It is a work where the strengths and weaknesses of the book are analysed. When writing a review, some questions have to be kept in mind. These are as follows.
Is there a specific topic that the book deals with? Does it seem to have any overall purpose? For what readership is it written? (The preface, acknowledgements, bibliography and index is generally helpful in answering these questions. Do not overlook facts about the author's background and the circumstances in which the book was created and published.)
Does the author state an explicit thesis or a theme? What are the theoretical assumptions? Are they discussed explicitly? From what point of view is the work written? Why did the author write on this subject rather than on some other subject? (Again, look for statements in the preface, etc. and follow them up in the rest of the work.)
Generating Interesting Articles and Titles – Part Two
Delving into parts we should not have to reach....colon cleansing made "interesting"
My previous post provided some generic formulae widely used for generating articles and titles that readers are attracted to. As a professional writer, you are not always in a position to pick and choose your assignments and you may be faced with producing content on the most unsavoury of topics. In this instance, I recently had to deal with an assignment on colon cleansing, and though the memory still haunts me, the writing show must nevertheless go on.
Previously, I dealt with "How to.." Lists and quoted a "Study" as a way of generating titles and articles. I will finish this off here, with three more general formula techniques.
The "Trend" is Your Friend !
Fashion is fickle and there are always new "trends" that are being latched on to. It's not difficult to pick up on a "fad" and turn that to your advantage, with your subject material. In this practical case, my memory recalls that Princess Diana was a colonic devotee, but I think that would be an article title too far, under the circumstances.
My cursory research into colon cleansing immediately threw up that there are two major methods of colon cleansing - using fibre based products and "oxygen" cleansers. There is a clear trend at the moment for "fiber" cleansers (this was for an American audience) and so it becomes simple to adapt an article and title to this trend.
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