How to
10 attributes of professional writers -- #7: Research properly
Can there be any excuse, in this day and age, for poorly-researched material? There are books, the internet and still, even in these straitened times, public libraries with reference sections.
Using video for creative writing
I always carry a pocket camcorder with me. It enables me to take both photos and videos. I use the videos as a potential basis for creative writing.
I try to make the videos only about 30 seconds long, because I like the idea of being minimalist – as you may have gathered from my article about using Twitter.
10 attributes of professional writers -- #4: Make it readable
A new Facebook page and a new newsletter
My blogging toolkit
What do you require in order to blog? Obviously, the list will be depend on what device you use, and its operating system, but here is the set of tools which I find invaluable.
How to write an article in 30 minutes or less
I think a lot of people, myself included, work most efficiently when they’re up against a tight deadline. This phenomenon has been observed both by Aesop (the fable of the tortoise and the hare), and Parkinson (“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”)
How To Write An Online Review
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Repeating Yourself
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Sorting
One nice feature of Word is the Sort feature. If you have a list, and you’d like to sort it into alphabetical order, this is what you do:
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Erase Formatting
*!@#^ #~*&%! Blast! If that sounds like you when you can’t seem to change what a piece of text looks like, don’t fret: there is a solution.
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Properties
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: AutoCorrect
Here’s a feature which you may have noticed, perhaps without thinking about it. Type a smiley face in “text speak”, ie :-), and you will notice that it immediately converts into a smiley face.
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: AutoSave
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Commenting
Making changes to a document, albeit provisionally, is something you can easily do in Review mode, which has been covered in a separate article. But that can easily become unwieldy, especially when more than a couple of people are involved: we all know the old saw about too many cooks.
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Reviewing
Here’s the wrong way of reviewing a document: make the changes you think necessary, and save the document with a different name. Sounds sensible enough, doesn’t it?
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Comparing Documents
It’s enough to make a grown man cry. You receive a second version of a document from a colleague, with no indication in the covering email about what’s changed. So what do you do? Print out both documents and pore over them till you’re cross-eyed?
No need:
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Table of Contents
When does a document need a table of contents? I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule about this, but let’s think about it from the other end: the reader. Is your document going to be challenging to navigate? Are there sections in it which people are likely to want to refer to or likely to wish to return to, and which they can’t see at a quick glance? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, I’d say that a table of contents is imperative, even if the document is only two or three pages long.
13 Things You Didn’t Know About Word: Outlining
Do you ever get to the point, when writing a long document, where you can’t see the wood for the trees? I know I do. Should I put that section right at the start? What would it look like if I made it the second section rather than the first? Would the whole document still flow, would the structure be wrong?
13 Things You Didn't Know About Word: Paragraph Styles
Some people really make a lot of work for themselves when it comes to headings. It seems straightforward enough: just select the text you want to use for the heading