Freelance Writing

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.
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PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES IN TECHNICAL WRITING

It is not always appealing to always write just about technical information, whether it is in parts or in detail, especially when you are writing a technical document. If your thoughts are clearly communicated through your writing, then it is likely to be understood and read by a wider audience. So, as a writer you need to build a bridge to obliterate the gap that often lingers between the writer and the reader of any technical writing material.

For example, to win a bid, a company’s project developers need to write a proposal in order to convince their potential client that they are the best team suited for the job. Their entire presentation is focused around this. Precise development of connection between the presenters and the viewers or the readers will do the trick. It is necessarily to place clearly in your reports the methodology, resources used, final results and the compatibility with legal regulations. Statistics, appropriate data collection, graphs, illustrations and necessary reports also need to be placed along with the main report(s).

To make the report justifiably free to access and easy to connote, appropriate footnotes also need to be placed. At the end of the report a lucid bibliography should be given, indicating all the detailed sources used, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism! Also, remember that overused sources can tarnish your originality and create unfathomable boredom, so keep your source-details neatly piled.
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What’s It All About Alfie? or Why Bother With Good Writing?

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.
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Aristotle, Aristotle was a Bugger for the Bottle….and Brainstorming

“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:

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!”
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