The old old question in writing and public speaking is: who is old? My mother always said that old was your own age plus 15. That works reasonably well until you pass the 80-year marker (as my mother has) and you have to admit that may you don’t need to tack on that decade-and-a-half to [...]
Foreign words can be a bit of a puzzler to the writer, but American English is pretty robust in its ability to stretch to accommodate exotic words. Perfumistas may converse about a product’s "sillage" (pronounced see-yage, it refers to the invisible cloud a good perfume forms about a person), while psychologists may ponder a patient’s [...]
This woman is a typochondriac.
You know the symptoms. This is the kind of person who sees a typo and goes into anaphylaxis, requiring both a team of paramedics and the National Guard to resuscitate her to a recuperative state. There she lies for months as teams of therapists help her cope with the fragments of [...]
Writing, particularly online writing, is one of many enterprises not particularly troubled by etiquette. While I don’t wish to supplant Miss Manners here, I think that our global undervaluing of etiquette leads to a great deal of confusion.
The purpose of etiquette has been expressed as never insulting another individual accidentally. That’s terribly profound, in [...]
I don’t actually have anything against Bill Gates, but it seems to me that he and his company have done a lot to ruin writing, design, art work, illustration, photography, and public speaking. Mr. Gates did this by helping to put PCs in every household and then providing tools that he assured them would allow [...]
There is a tendency among certain people to regard typos as a sign of Armageddon.
These people often become indignant upon sight of any sort of typographical error or other error that causes letters on a page or screen to appear in a way they deem improper. Even a gnat smushed on a monitor that might [...]
Revisions are part and parcel of the writer’s life, particularly if said writer works for clients. The very same client who is so woefully unable to put a sentence together that he hires an outside writer suddenly emerges, once text is written, to be so skilled at the art and practice of writing clearly that [...]
Writing is not really about words. Writing is certainly not about grammar or spelling. Writing isn’t really even about communication. Writing is about structure.
A writer is somebody who packages thought.
To do that, writers use words. And the objective of packaged thought is communication.
But the act of writing is about packaging thought. I think it’s a [...]
I was recently part of a protracted and painful online discussion on a writers’ board on the topic of online writing. To be more specific, the writers were addressing the question as to whether or not online activity was good or bad for writing.
The subject of pay for online writing was discussed only briefly and [...]
I love FAQs. They’re popular these days thanks to the Internet and they represent a good training vehicle if you have a complicated topic or comprehensive subject and you need to make sure people get a whole lot of material in a fairly painless package.
Plus the question-and-answer format goes back to the old Socratic method. Many [...]
Problem clients are everywhere. They are the people who don’t want to pay well, or even at all. They are the folks who keep changing their minds and wanting to see a revision to reflect every idle thought that passes through their caffeinated and ADD-rattled brains. They are the kind who figure that one project [...]
Most articles have a fairly rigid structure, which may or may not be spelled out by the journal or magazine. If they don’t, read what they already publish and dissect it. The cool thing about periodical writing is you can see what sells by looking at what gets published. Just analyze it and use that [...]
Here’s how to write a brochure, even if you think you know how to write a brochure. In a brochure, you are building “tracks” through the content. The first track is the track that involves the headline and cover of the brochure. That’s Track 1, because that’s all some people will ever read.
Track 2 involves [...]
Copywriting is the art of writing persuasively. It’s harder than you think. In fact, it may be the toughest kind of writing there is because top copywriters make a bundle.
I sometimes get involved in writing persuasively, that is, writing with an agenda. The goal is not only to convey information but to convey information in [...]
I have laryngitis. There is something going around Texas and it hit me right in the throat. I have been without a serviceable voice all week. Today is my best day of 2009 and I sound like a weary Rod Stewart.
All this made me think of the writer’s voice. A good writer has more voices [...]
I do a lot of medical writing and it is always a bit like stepping through into another dimension. Serious clinical writing (the kind of stuff that gets published in medical journals or similar outlets) requires not only serious science but real logic.
It’s quite a departure from the world most of us live in. Most [...]
That’s correct, by the way. You’re supposed to use the nominative case (I rather than me) when you have a predicate nominative, which is what this happens to be. That’s why when you knock on the door and some gruff voice demands to know who is there, you should properly reply, “It is I.” The [...]
If writing was a university, there would be one entire wing of the university devoted entirely to the proper study of grammar and syntax. People would expound on things like etymology (“did you know that the word hospitality takes its origin from the word hostile?”) and try to stump each other with proper usage issues [...]
Working Texas Writer was originally a static website, a basic place that talked about writing as a profession. I chose the name Working Texas Writer because I’m not really interested in the theoretical business of being a writer.
I once corresponded with a woman who told me that she would rather have a website that used [...]
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