أرشيف شهر Writing

Creating a Post: Mindmapping

أبريل 19, 2008 في 10:22 م · Filed under Writing

One of the first things I do when coming up with a post is to open up my favourite text editor and write down some thoughts. Usually, they end up being for a variety of posts, rather than a single post, but once I find myself done writing out my immediate thoughts and ideas, I go back and ask questions about each main point.

Ask yourself what would you like to know if you were reading about the subject? Can it be broken into sub-questions that you can answer? What keywords do you think the article should have? What is your target audience? Does it answer some if not all of the traditional “who, what, where, when, why and how”?

A good example is something broad like “blogging software”. You can write questions like:

  • what software do I use?
  • what is my favourite software?
  • what are the advantages of each package I know something about?
  • who are the authors of the different software?

Keep growing out the points you have for your article until there are around nine or so main points. Start reading back over the points and making sentences out of them, write down more questions as you think of them, do a one or two sentence answer on each of the questions you come up with. Build sentences around the keywords you want in the article. Don’t worry about format, flow, or even the rules of the english language. This is all about generating content and ideas, not getting ready to publish a fully formed idea.

The more keywords, questions, and sentences you can come up with, the easier the total article will be when you do finally compose it.

I don’t know how many times that jotting down a variety of words, thoughts and questions have made my blog posting life easier, especially now that I have written more than ten thousand posts in my blogging history.

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Do You Read More Than You Write?

مارس 18, 2008 في 12:33 م · Filed under Tips, Writing

One of the issues that I have is my obsession with learning new things. This obsession leads me to subscribe to way too many blogs in hopes of finding great things that inspire me to write, but it also takes away the time I have for writing. At one point, I was spending half of my day reading a variety of RSS feeds in Bloglines.

I have since cut that down and can go through my daily read list in around an hour or two, but when you add on the forums I participate in, the social networks, and things like Twitter, I am back reading more than writing.

Reading can be a great source of inspiration and content, but I find that living my life, exploring my interests, and disconnecting from my normal routine makes me much more productive than the days where I ingest content all day until I am so overloaded with information, I can’t remember things that happened two minutes ago.

If you are recovering from St. Patrick’s Day partying, and you have the option to get off work early and just recharge and relax, I suggest you use it. Get out of your normal routine, disconnect from the Internet and put pen to paper or fingers to notepad, and just crank out some new, original, interesting posts.

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Dealing With Idea Theft

يناير 16, 2008 في 7:01 م · Filed under Community, Writing

If you know someone is taking the ideas behind each one of your posts, and then rewriting them to publish on their own blog, how would you feel about that? How would you deal with it? It is something I have recently noted on a blog I used to really like. It seems as I write articles on here, sometime a week or two later, an original article with the same topic shows up on the other blog.

At first, I thought it was just coincidence, but it just happened again. A post I had written less than a week ago has been written from scratch and put on a blog more popular than this one.

While I do like being a source for ideas, I don’t like how this person is going about it. I really don’t know how I feel over this whole thing. They aren’t copying my article text. They aren’t linking back to me, but they are using my posts to come up with their post topics.

Am I a victim of the huge echo chamber of the web?

While I know there is nothing I can do about this whole thing, and I should probably try to be pleased that they think so highly of me, it can be really hard for me to come up with post ideas, and while I can’t say that I have never taken a post idea from someone else’s blog, I usually try to stick to their long ago archives, while this person is taking less than a week to basically repurpose my ideas.

It is a very strange feeling. I would love to hear what my readers think about all of this. And if the person “stealing my ideas” reads this, I wonder if they even realize they are doing it?

Note: They aren’t copying my posts, but instead taking the general idea of my post and re-writing them from scratch. None of my content is being stolen… just every post idea I have that appeals to their audience. I don’t know if that changes anything for anyone, but I wanted to make sure everyone understood that fact.

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Creating a Post: My Process

نوفمبر 12, 2007 في 12:00 ص · Filed under Writing

WTL recently asked me to explain more on how I get from a blank screen to a published post. Writing on nearly a dozen blogs in many different niches, while making sure to leave time to do other things in the day can be quite difficult, but there are ways to make it easier on yourself.

The Ideas

First off, I highly recommend brainstorming. Sit down, come up with a few ideas. If you are having troubles coming up with anything, look at other blogs in your niche, and see what they have been writing for the past month. Also, write down some keywords of what you want your blog to be about. Between your competition, some keywords and your imagination, you should be able to come up with a few ideas.

A good number of ideas is around twenty. If you haven’t gotten to that point in your brainstorming list, then check out more competitors, do some searches on Technorati and Google’s Blog Search to see what others have written about in regards to the keywords you have come up with. I don’t recommend stealing post ideas, but there is nothing better than reading someone’s opinion than making you realize what you want to write about.

Maximum Time Spent: 20 minutes

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Blogger Doesn’t Mean English Major

اغسطس 30, 2007 في 1:33 ص · Filed under Writing

One of the most annoying things to deal with as a blogger is the annoyance of having the spelling and grammar police comment on your posts about how you messed up various bits of the English language.

I have to admit that while English is my first language, and really the only one I am competent in, my schooling in its grammar and spelling was pretty horrible. I didn’t learn what a noun or verb was until I was in grade eight, or thirteen years old. I think that is pretty dismal, and while it doesn’t excuse any of the mistakes I, or anyone else makes, readers have to remember that in blogging, it is rare to have an editor, and if there is an editor, he or she probably wasn’t an English major.

Readers should cut bloggers some slack, and try to understand the context of the post, and enjoy the content. I don’t mind when I am corrected on a personal name, or website, but I don’t need to know that I missed a comma.

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Writing Tip: What Do You Want to Read?

اغسطس 17, 2007 في 1:35 ص · Filed under Tips, Writing

One of the tips I have been giving bloggers lately is to think about what they would want to read. I have had to go outside my normal comfort zone a few times in writing articles. I have had to deal with subjects I know absolutely nothing about, but when it all comes down to it, if you think about what you would like to read about a certain topic, you can then go backwards from there.

Say you are tasked with writing about kitchens and you are a technology buff. Well, you can mix those two interests rather easily for your first few articles.

Titles like:

  • Ten Great Kitchen Gadgets
  • The Ultimate Geek Kitchen
  • Kitchens of Yesterday versus Today

Fairly quickly you can build up an index of titles which will help focus your research and writing, and allow you to build up content in niches that you have never thought to explore before. It is a simple trick, but it definitely works.

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Writing Issues: Lack of Tone

اغسطس 9, 2007 في 10:19 م · Filed under Writing

One of the worst things about writing is the lack of depth that it has in comparison to other forms of communication. You don’t have the inflections that voice has, or the facial expressions and body language that face to face or video communication has. This means that what you write can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, creating a huge misunderstanding.

This happened to me recently in my posting about the con’s of problogging, where some people thought I was trying to make problogging sound like a really hard job, where I was instead only implying that it isn’t the celebrity lifestyle that many people picture when they think about working from home on the computer all day.

I was hoping to inform people looking at the career, and instead some people too offense thinking that I was complaining about the job. These are the misunderstandings that are difficult to avoid in writing, and something that even I need to work on.

Making sure that you work hard to be very explicit in your writing to provide proper tone, and sticking to that single tone, can reduce problems of misunderstanding.

I am sorry to those that thought I was belittling the difficulties that go along with their careers.

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