Etherpad Shows Google Docs How It’s Done
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/etherpad-shows-google-docs-how-its-done/
Resume: Six Words You Should Drop from Your Resume
http://lifehacker.com/5137212/six-words-you-should-drop-from-your-resume
Scriptwriting in the UK: Joss Whedon's Top 10 Writing Tips
http://dannystack.blogspot.com/2009/01/joss-whedons-top-10-writing-tips.html

mostly applicable to any sort of writing

via squakfox

Must get interview

Jon Favreau

ジョン・ファブローとオバマの間でどのようなやりとりがあったか。

Guardian profile of Jon Favreau, head speechwriter for President Barack Obama.

eine art meta-"making of" mitsamt vorstellung eines engen mitarbeiter von barack obama

Getting people to say yes is the goal for any sales message. It's what psychologists call “compliance. However, my ...

frífontar

Mitkriegen, wenn andere das selbe (ab)schreiben. Nicht, dass das angesichts von CC wirklich wichtig wäre.

Free Private Journal and Diary service like blog but private

Visualization of arguments

Cool widget that allows you to browse with cursor over brain maps

How to write a book notes by Steven Johnson

Have you ever wanted to write award-winning television, don't own a computer, typewriter, or pen, and yet are somehow reading this? Well, you're in luck! Just follow this simple guide, selecting

opskrift på hvordan man skruer et afsnit af House MD sammen

On August 12, 1982, I took a 10 x 7 1/8 inch National Blank Book Company composition book from the supply closet of my then employer, Vignelli Associates. From that moment, I have never been without one. I always have one at my desk. I take one with me to every meeting. I am now in the middle of Notebook #85. It's in front of me right now. Together, these well-worn books create a history of my working life that spans three decades.

Inspiration for keeping a notebook.

내 손글씨로 폰트를 만든다!

Make your own handwriting font

YourFonts.com is a FREE online font generator that allows you to create your own TrueType fonts within a couple of minutes. Go make your own handwriting as a font!

Take Flat Stanley everywhere and write about him.

later

"95% of web users do not read 80% of your content. With these statistics already working against you, how can you improve your content to ensure that readers are getting the best user experience from your site?"

あなたのコンテンツを価値あるものにする11箇条

Writing for the web is a skill set of its own. Website text, or copy, needs to be written in a different tone for the web than a brochure. It needs to be

freelance writing ideas

How (Not) to Write like a Designer: 5 Tricks You Didn't Learn in Studio ...

Half technical, half intuitive, the design process is tough to explain. But that’s my job—I’m a design writer. I write so you don’t have to, putting into words the work that you’d rather do than write about. But write you must—website copy, proposals, captions, emails to clients—and though the worse designers are at it, the more work I get, in the spirit of collaboration I’m going to share my secrets. So what if it puts me out of a job.

Some very very good insights here. Particularly about the 1st para and WHY it needs to be different.

"Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking."

The best readers are obstinate. They possess a nearly inexhaustible persistence that drives them to read, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in

Some interesting web design thoughts - does bloggernacle design lead us to skim instead of read?

ohjeita kirjastolle blogin pitämiseen

mostly related to blogging. great ideas, start.

Zinsser

I’ve dug through the clutter and selected 36 posts that can help you become an original and all-round problogger. And because vanity is a blogger’s right, I’ve also included four articles by my own hand. Themes are Development & Design, Workflow, Publishing, Inspiration and Comments. Enjoy!

I’ve dug through the clutter and selected 36 posts that can help you become an original and all-round problogger.

jim...sadly your blog is not on here....YET! although...i guess your blog isn't really geared towards writing...

Creative writing blogs.

Cool web content. Can generate revenue

a seamless source control tool for ordinary people.

cory doctorow's hyper texty tool

"a seamless source control tool for ordinary people"

Using Git to track and version your writing.

Elementary rules of usage for twitter. "“This is a new genre of writing,” said Mr. Sagolla. “A new form of literature, in some ways.” " Being publised "We are working on a book to compile the most relevant styles and tips for effective short form writing. We will most likely publish it first as an iPhone App, then as a paid PDF download. If you are interested in publishing this in printed form, please contact us:"

Research

how to make your own book

Here are six great sites that will help you publish your work, guaranteeing you a published book that can be sold via different outlets, such as Amazon.

6 Ways to Publish Your Own Book

Amazing javascript work. It's sure a heck lot of work unless there is a tool to make it really easily. Anyway here is an awesome javascript timing example.

watch Paul Graham type an essay

「Startups in 13 Sentences」の作成過程。文章の作成と推敲過程がよくわかる

"A master class in storytelling. Ira Glass, host of "This American Life" on radio and TV, has spent years telling stories, and getting stories told. In one of the most popular Gel talks ever, Ira describes the elements of a good story."

I heart this american life

Ira Glass

Dumb Little Man shares ideas to make the everyday person more productive in life. Expect to read tips on finance, saving money, business, and some DIY for the house.

Always on the side of the egg - Haaretz - Israel News http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1064909.html englishenglish middleeast politics education literature news israel speech

村上春樹エルサレム賞受賞スピーチ（英文）

Mistakes in gun portrayal in movies and comics.

Gun mistakes writers and movies make.

I made a partial list below (I'm sure Duane Thomas can add to it) of dumb things I see in novels and comics and movies in the area of firearms. A few of these (for dramatic license) I make myself. But they're still dumb.

Outliner software for the Mac

Mit Tree hilft dabei Informationen zu erfassen und zu strukturieren.

Outliner for Mac OS X. Expand Items on the Right Side.

Tree assists you in organizing the information, drawing up plans, and brainstorming new ideas. Tree allows you to be writing out segments of ideas and keywords, and rearranging and sorting out these, repeatedly.

Assists you in organizing the information, drawing up plans, and brainstorming new ideas.

a wiki all about creating and sharing digital stories

reak

A poem demonstrating the many variant forms in English.

Pronunciation

A poem of tricky words that highlight exactly how daunting English is to the non-native speaker. This shit is crazy.

Good tips within

red

I came across this list of “colorful” words while looking up adjectives. The list seems to go on forever with words like “primrose” and “xanthic” and their definitions.

"This list contains 168 definitions of obscure colour terms using combinations of 'normal' colours of the rainbow and descriptive adjectives; e.g. cardinal = deep scarlet red; russet = reddish brown. Note that most English speakers outside the U.S. spell colour with the added British 'u' rather than the American version color. Don't worry if the colours (or colors) in your universe don't match up with the definitions I've given for these words, though - I've been known to have skewed perceptions of reality ..."

{no comment}

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7907888.stm slowdeathofhandwriting handwritinghandwriting

the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

At once a optimist and a cynic, Vonnegut's love for humanity recognized and embraced each of its shortcomings. With his satirical blend of science fiction and humanism, Vonnegut gifted us with his clever one-liners and pearls of wisdom mixed in with the occasional dirty drawing. Following are a few of the gems he cast along the way, in the only acceptable format for true widom these days, the motivational poster.

Motivational posters with quotes of Kurt Vonnegut

The Cult of Done Manifesto 1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion. 2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done. 3. There is no editing stage. 4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it. 5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it. 6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done. 7. Once you're done you can throw it away. 8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done. 9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right. 10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes. 11. Destruction is a variant of done. 12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done. 13. Done is the engine of more.

ts as done. So do mistakes.

Hi

125-page transcript from a week-long 1978 story conference between Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan, where they hashed out Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Monday, March 09, 2009 The “Raiders” Story Conference Hey, guys, you’re going to love this (and thanks, Viktor). There is a link now available to download the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

JG: "Speaking of George Lucas, here’s an amazing find by Mystery Man on Film: a 125-page transcript from a week-long 1978 story conference between Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan, where they hashed out Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Sure, there's a 125 page document on the interwebs now that transcribes the meetings that Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan had to plan out Raiders of the Lost Ark, but even better is this post chock-full of analysis (with examples) of that document, finding principles of storytelling, screenwriting, and collaboration. "7) No idea is a bad idea when you’re brainstorming. These guys were all over the place with ideas and there’s nothing wrong with that. As I mentioned earlier, many of the ideas discussed, like the plane crash sequence and mine cart chase, were used in the second film. So what helped determine which sequence should be kept and thrown away? Redundancies in concept. You already had a chase scene here, so why have another one here? Let’s come up with something different. You know? That kind of thing."

"There is a 125-page transcript of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark. There were about 10 Screenwriting Lessons I took away from this experience and thought they might be worth sharing."

"So then they go back to figure out when and how you can setup the snake joke in the opening sequence. A lot of screenwriting is backtracking, of setups and payoffs."

Man-oh-man, Spielberg and Lucas were idea machines. They could’ve sat there coming up with Indiana Smith ideas forever. There were enough ideas generated in these meetings for two films, which they actually used for two films. I must say, it’s rather unusual to have meetings with a producer and a director and be given so many ideas. Not that meetings with producers and directors wouldn’t have a lot of ideas but I’m not sure you would encounter such a volume as this. For screenwriters, it’s a goldmine. If you try to forget the finished film and put yourself into Kasdan’s shoes and you have all these ideas thrown at you, it can be a daunting task. What do you keep? What do you throw away? How do you make all this work?

[via Moltz]

how to write a book

0. Begin with an idea, a string of ideas, 1. Use them in a compound sentence, 2. Add rhythm with a dependent clause....

Now I know how @vaguery gets his posts to scroll! ;-)

You've now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter...

How to do T&Cs

The bullet points on the side, which summarize the agreement are a great idea!

My classmate Noah passed along this terms of service agreement. It has two columns: legal English on the left, plain English summary on the right.

Terms of service formatted for maximum readability.

Awesome TOS? I like the summary.

Términos de servicio con una versión resumida legible.

In writing an article, I know I’m done when I delete. The process leading to done is chaotic; it’s days, weeks, or months of aggregating writing where I collect and organize paragraphs and sentences. Over time, content creation becomes content shaping as I organize the thoughts into a pleasing coherence.

How to write a good tweet that puts a bit of you into it.

Say More with Less

the sense of tweeting

glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal al

Amazing bio piece on David Foster Wallace; actually chokes me up while reading; totally essential - must blog about this

David Foster Wallace

Web design hints

The Bygone Bureau is a journal of modern thought, specializing in travel writing and cultural criticism. We launched on June 25, 2007 and update every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

text/html; charset=UTF-8

Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text.

Un nuovo alertbox con i consigli del guru dell'usabilità

David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”

Article on the writer David Foster Wallace who committed suicide on Sep 12th 2008. He battled with depression.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant

"Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"-dfw, dfw's writing after infinite jest, struggle with depression, portrait of older dfw, some biography

Some interesting thoughts on how to spread a blog post. Could be useful! :)

mashable

Writing is good for you!

A link's first 11 characters are the most important, their impact should not be squandered with bland, generic words.

... shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items.

This kind of information is useful to me as background to my understanding of digital literacy. Soon I can note it via Diigo, but not yet.

»Testing how well people understand a link's first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items.«

by Cathy Curtis posted on AIGA | the professional association for design website

Great website!!! Article is very instructive

Excellent guide to writing for the web from Cathy Curtis, a former staff writer for The LA Times.

"It struck me recently that the web has led me to develop a different way of writing—tighter, simpler, more transparent. The results, I believe, are greater clarity and persuasiveness, and a speedier, more user-friendly read."

Merlin Mann talk about making money to do more art

We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies

"My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing. / [...] / No one gets into something like this without an obsession, but if your obsession is with the money, and your revenue is directly correlated to page views, then rather than write or produce anything with any actual merit or integrity, you’ll dance like a monkey and split your articles across multiple “pages” and spend more time ginning up sensational Digg-bait headlines than writing the articles themselves. It’s thievery — not of money, but of readers’ attention." / [...] / The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient."

"There is an easy formula for doing it wrong: publish attention-getting bullshit and pull stunts to generate mindless traffic. The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient. Obsession times voice is a pretty good stab at a simple formula for doing it right."

criticism of 'The Element of Style'

Eloquent rant against Strunk & White.

'The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.'

HA! On the other hand I would strongly recommend reading a book whose style is intentionally derived from this one: 'The Elements of Programming Style' by Kernighan and Plauger. Yes, *that* B.Kernighan.

HBPublishing: How to Revise an Email So That People Will Read It http://tinyurl.com/dggzyl [from http://twitter.com/dcouturepdx/statuses/1530523955]

Rather than give you a review of the book, which you can find on Amazon, I thought it would be useful to share some ideas and take aways that apply to content creation - the new business of marketing and communications.

Entrepreneur

A Disciplined Way To Deal With Email

Author Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone

kindle ebook e-book

数图研究

win some bar bets

thoughts on graphic design, creativity and beauty

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is “the difference between lightning and ...

Evaluation: Students will be graded on the RBBEAW* system, developed to assess and score students based on their own relative merit. A+ = 100–90 A = 89–80 A- = 79–70 A-- = 69–60 A--- = 59–50 A---- = 49–0

marvelous syllaubs for the post-print age.

ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Instructor: Robert Lanham

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers. Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness.

"ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era"

ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

Twitter has become the place for sharing content links. If your content catches attention on Twitter and spreads, suddenly you’re getting significant traffic from people who may have never visited your site before.

Artículo con consejos acerca de escribir entradas en Twitter con valor añadido.

Yes! This will be covered in @TheBook.

An interesting article justifying twittering as an activity

A great post concerning how there is nothing inherent to the banality of Twitter updates; this banality exists in "real" conversations as well. It's a good point and one that I've been trying to make recently with friends who "just don't get Twitter."

Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

"...Twitter is a note-taking technology, end of story. You take short-form notes with it, limited to 140 characters. [...] If I attend a public lecture but I start to jot things down in a Moleskine, it would seem that only a particularly virulent form of social fascism would ask me to put that notebook down and begin 'sharing ideas' with the people next to me. No thanks – I'd rather write, actually. [...] there seem to be quite a lot of assumptions at work [when people object to microblogging], with so many class, political, and even gender implications for who is allowed to speak, who we are meant to listen to, who can write, how they are permitted to do so, in what social contexts writing is meant to occur, and what topics can be legitimately addressed by others, that I'd hope a much longer discussion about this might someday take place."

"What very much bothers me about this attitude toward Twitter is something else: if you were to go around the United States reading the handwritten diaries of, say, high-school girls or adolescent boys or even well-read college students, you would find equally inane chattering: "I feel fat today." "Can't wait for summer in Boca! But I need new shorts." "My history professor is HOT." "I hate holidays. Christmas at home is so boring." Are you really going to tell me that the average contemporary, hand-written diary is any more interesting than that?...I fail to see any clear distinction between someone's boring Twitter feed – considered only semi-literate and very much bad – and someone else's equally boring, paper-based diary – considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good. Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It's a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed."

Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It's a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

With the caveat that this post doesn't have much to do with architecture, but with the further caveat that I will be speaking about media – specifically online media – next week at the Australian National Architecture Conference, I thought I'd offer a few thoughts here about Twitter.

It seems "Twitter" is code for "Please tell me how you think Twitter is stupid and useless." This article begs to differ.

Not sure about the 10 mins bit, but some good ideas in here for writing blog posts

Ten Ways to Crank Out Killer Posts in Ten Minutes or Less

http://michaelmartine.com/2009/03/10/ten-topics-in-ten-mins/ TenWaystoCrankOutKillerPostsinTenMinutesorLess

Remarkable Blog Consulting and Coaching

The gold standard in web headline concision

BBC News may be a good place to point to as an example of good writing for the web.

how short headlines explain a lot of info. Great for sci. articles

Have you ever blurted out, "Wow, that guy is just so...so..." and then were left floundering with nothing to say? Well, it's not always your fault. English doesn't have words for every situation, or even the ones that happen every damned day. Fortunately, other languages usually do. And since we already borrow words from them (just recently we've taken "schadenfreude," the German word for pleasure in someone else's misfortune) here's a few that we need to pick up right away.

Like darkroom, but with a few nice extra features

Zenware for full screen distraction free creative writing. No whistles and bells, just empty screen, you and your words. WriteMonkey is light, fast, and perfectly handy for those who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter but live in modern times.

Creative Ways You Can Profit From Content Marketing

Maybe you think “content marketing” means having a blog that makes money. Or that it’s about producing content for sites ...

The FontFeed is a daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world. Eat up.

With the inven­tion of “desk­top pub­lish­ing”, design­ers found them­selves set­ting type on their com­put­ers for the first time. Until then, they had made type spec­i­fi­ca­tions for type­set­ters and left the job up to the pro­fes­sion­als. As a result, you can still see clas­sic inac­cu­ra­cies in type­set­ting, even in top-​quality printed matter. Here you will find some tips from Erik Spiek­er­mann, designer of FF Meta®, Meta Design founder, co-​author of “Stop Steal­ing Sheep”, and a FontShop founder, which will pre­vent some of the more obvi­ous blun­ders.

Succinct and useful typography guidelines for everyone laying pixels on the web. Read the comments for the back and forth over the “padded en” vs the em dash. Is the em dash dying?

I've been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume's tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we're a bit overwhelmed). It's been a great learning experience and I've gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject.

Twitter is a wonderful social tool, but did you know that it's also a goldmine of information?

Twitter tools for getting local or topical information, setting up alerts for updates on particular topics, search, trends, distributing and organizing information. (BTW, I really like the design of this paricular site)

a visual map and thesaurus

How does Vocabgrabber work? VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save. Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text. Click on the word map or the highlighted word in the example to see the Visual Thesaurus in action. Want to try it out? Click on one of our sample texts to fill the box and start grabbing! How can I view my vocabulary list? After you grab the vocabulary from a text, you will see a list of words and phrases in "tag cloud" view. In the default view, words in the vocab list are arranged by relevance (more on that below!). In t

I’m a science fiction writer, and as I became more familiar with design, it struck me that the futuristic objects and services within science fiction are quite badly designed.

Design Fiction

Bruce Sterling

Many science fiction writers, believe it or not, were capable of understanding Wittgenstein. User experience design, however, was far beyond them. It was also beyond Wittgenstein, because there are things we might imagine and speak about that we do pass over in silence because we are writing in books.

Stephen Fry's letter to himself: Dearest absurd childJust who was the young, arrogant and confused man to whom Stephen Fry recently felt compelled to write a long and heartfelt letter? Himself, 35 years ago

You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."

i am so charmed by old men writing wise letters to young men- rilke's, 'open letter to a young man', hofstadter writing to his young self, and now this one too

Stephen Fry: You wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time your future self had the decency to write back

oh Stephen!

English - Writing

Quick mini lessons, quizzes, and games about different writing resources.

English writing interactive activities for: Argument, Comment, Factual writing instructions, Factual writing leaflets, Factual writing letters, Writing a story beginnings and endings, Writing a story planning. Also includes Revision and Quizzes

Writing a Story/Planning

Orwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

ith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s.

見出しは大事ですな。

A little list of proofreading marks that could come in handy.

Proof Reading Marks

funny complaining letter to rich about the worst meal somebody appears to have been expected to eat in their entire lives...

Look at this Richard. Just look at it:

This is a letter recently received by the Virgin Atlantic customer complaints team and is currently being hailed on news blogs, such as this one on The Telegraph as possibly the funniest customer complaint letter ever.

mdenny: RT @wmacphail: I love this complaint letter to Virgin http://is.gd/hpLv

Hilarious complaint letter to Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines.

ほんのすこし書き方に注意すれば、あなたのドキュメントはさらに分かりやすくなる！

help for writers

some basic concepts about writing. Sometimes these concepts are called grammar, mechanics, or conventions

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

Genius - The Modern View

IQ persistence and success

"The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

how to use git as version control for writers

nice intro to Flashbake

Save snapshots of frequently-updated files over time with programmer-strength version control—but without the learning curve. Free software Flashbake captures working files and adds details like the weather and your Twitter status to each version automatically.

the only question is which tweet to pick!

Twitter

Love it

puts tweets on paper and mails them to you for free.

Blogs and Twitter have almost eliminated any barrier to publishing. You have an idea and in a few minutes your thoughts can be online. Think about it – with every person thinking about more than 50,000 thoughts a day, producing online content can be simple. Maybe. But simply churning out meaningless content does not guarantee that others will read what you write. Make this mistake and people will read what you write and write you off. What’s the alternative? Use your creativity to generate content that will inspire and transform the lives of the audience in a positive way. Remember that it costs time (and indirectly – money) for your audience to read what you write. And, they expect a good return for that investment. You will know whether you are succeeding in influencing your audience in a positive way because the audience will tell you. No, maybe not directly but by the way they respond to your content. So here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content:

Mind you, there are still some Java issues.

http://cyblog.jp/modules/weblogs/1486 cyblog.jp/modules/weblogs/1486 jp 3

SubEthaEdit面白そう←同時にテキスト編集 まぁ、screenでも良いのだと思うけど、手軽だし

An ongoing project devoted to discovering all the words and everything about them

Show show words are used (both in terms of definitions and usage, including real-time)

But to the stakeholders -- managers, CEOs, customers, shareholders, etc. -- software development is a mystery. They don't want to know everything about it, but they want to know enough to be able to predict the behavior of software development, at least approximately.

Why do we need an analogy? We know what we do. We program computers, with all that entails. And we know what that means, because we do it. But to the stakeholders -- managers, CEOs, customers, shareholders, etc. -- software development is a mystery. They don't want to know everything about it, but they want to know enough to be able to predict the behavior of software development, at least approximately.

t replace a programmer with just any other programmer and get similar results. It also suggests that you should evaluate what kind of project you're creating when you decide who your team should be, and how it will run. The creation of mysteries and young adult fiction and so-called "bodice rippers" and the vast sea of nonfiction books all have their own particular structure and constraints (you'd be surprised at how rigid and controlling publishers are about these things, as if they are manufacturing some kind of basic commodity -- "the murder has to happen in the first 10 pages" etc.). None of these are the mass-market bestsellers ("killer apps") that are sold by the author's voice and style (few of which I find readable). The mass-market bestsellers usually don't coincide with the great writers, since most people don't have the patience to read these meta-craftsmen, just as most programmers don't read the source code for compilers.

Agreed. Interesting comments, too. I write one-liners, short stories and novels in Python. I have many unfinished novels.

The art of creating stories and the craft of sharing them. Inspired by the written word and the authors that link words and phrases together to form tales.

Ficly is a place for playing with story-telling; a collaborative environment where anyone can pick up a narrative thread and weave a prequel or sequel.

Ficly is a place for playing with story-telling; a collaborative environment where anyone can pick up a narrative thread and weave a prequel or sequel. You can start a story or jump into someone else's tale. The possibilities are endless, and in some cases, so are the stories.

short story collaboration site, write prequels or sequels to the work of others.

word processor, file converter

Online NotePad, Writing Pad. It can be used as online doc. Conversion into html docs, pdfs, notepad etc.

"Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness."

Microcopy counts

The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copy-writing.

Article on a book I'd like to read

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.”

Well written piece.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

well, this got me worked up, didn't it now?

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

Thoughtful listing of key issues affecting the production and consumption of 'literature'

terrifying and exciting and wow

Whether you're a blogger, journalist, or writer, you know that the days of pen and paper alone are long gone.

"This was preserved because the author had been Emperor. How much ancient wisdom was lost because the common Roman citizen lacked TCP/IP?"

"[by 1700 bc, the minoans were trading with spain, had big cities with flush toilets, a written language, and moderately sophisticated metalworking technology. had it not been for the eruption of thera (on santorini), it is quite possible that romans would have watched the assassination of julius caesar on television.]"

'This article, prepared to support a talk at Wordcamp 2009, discusses how writing itself has changed because of the availability of the Web and the Weblog.'

June 9, 2009: USATODAY.com

Social Networking writing tips

There's an art to writing on Facebook or Twitter -- really - USATODAY.com http://bit.ly/aCXpt [from http://twitter.com/chiefshu/statuses/2112073508]

good

from A. Courosa

Publish full articles without needing a blog or site.

escrever 1 resources tools web article articles writing editor freeware technology microblogging Publishing blogging twittertools publish write4.net content http://write4.net/en

The Internet landscape has changed over the past few years, and the rules of online marketing have changed with it. In this excerpt from his latest book, Brandon spells out how to create and distribute an effective press release.

People don't know what "louche" means?

"As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior."

the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009

publishing

This wiki gathers information about publications that LIS professionals might want to write for -- whether they want to reach their colleagues or their communities. All editors, publishers, and LIS professionals are welcome to contribute to the publication profiles. T

This wiki gathers information about publications that LIS professionals might want to write for -- whether they want to reach their colleagues or their communities. All editors, publishers, and LIS professionals are welcome to contribute to the publication profiles.

SLIS developed featrues in ALA Direct

fantastic!

"Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: 'Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….' "

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news. - The idea behind the paper’s June 10 special edition was to honor Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.

General online magazine by and about women

はてなブックマークで話題になった文章術に関する記事を「執筆」「推敲」「校正」に分けてご紹介

あとでよんどこ

Programmer turned novelist uses his skills to create custom writing software. Perhaps I should try it sometime to put down some of my wilder ideas?

You can write a headline in an infinite number of ways. However, certain types of headlines have proven themselves repeatedly ...

The following 9 headline formulas are some of the easiest to write and the most powerful. When it comes time to write a headline, try one of these first. At the very least, this can give you a creative jumping off point to write a headline that works.

kaputte Dateinen zum bestellen, wenn einmal die Arbeit nicht zum Termin fertig ist.

Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: Email the file to your professor along with your "here's my assignment" email. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is "unfortunately" corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!

Diff as semantic operations, not as bare difference.

Revizr is a new way to work collaboratively to improve the quality of your documents. Use it for editing, proofreading, and ongoing development when you need other people's input but remain responsible for the contents.

What Revizr does for you: * Keeps all your revisers working together on the same copy of the document, with updates shared live * Turns reviser edits into what looks like hand-drawn markup (but it's usable) * Gives you a complete history of your document including who suggested what, when * Lets you revise documents with rich text, images, and formatting

ht now. You can select any

ew way to work collaboratively to improve the quality of your documents.

Effective writing skills are to a writer what petrol is to a car. Like the petrol and car relationship, without solid skills writers cannot move ahead. These skills don’t come overnight, and they require patience and determination. You have to work smart and hard to acquire them. Only with experience, you can enter the realm of effective, always-in-demand writers.

Guy dates a girl who claims to be a geek too, he catches her because she claimed to prove P=NP. Reminds me of the lies I faced when I dated ER, but this one is worse.

The sad story of a guy taken for a ride.

The better way to build your vocabulary | Contextual Examples From the Daily News

最新のニュースや記事から単語を学ぶ。ライターが使う最新の単語やキーワードなどが学べる。こりゃすごいがああたしにはちょいとむずかし。

resume guidelines

I think the notion of content templates will be useful. Both for the Collections overview working group and for the implementation of a CMS at NLA Web.

online version

This handbook is not intended as a collection of “rules”. Beyond the obvious, such as the cardinal sin of plagiarism, the dishonesty of fabrication or the immorality of bribe-taking, journalism is a profession that has to be governed by ethical guiding principles rather than by rigid rules. The former liberate, and lead to better journalism. The latter constrain, and restrict our ability to operate. What follows is an attempt to map out those principles, as guidance to taking decisions and adopting behaviours that are in the best interests of Reuters, our shareholders, our customers, our contacts, our readers and our profession.

Private journal entries for classroom use

SPU-Dorr class

Can take notes or do free writing on this

includes various notes for myself!

journal

Free journal

Great for students to write private journals entries. Can see multiple students using this!

Online collabrative journal

"It applies in all walks of life. Church services and prayer books are full of three-part lists. Research has shown that people know a prayer is finished when it ends with them praying for three things. They know to say 'Amen' and don't have to be prompted." Also, it is economical - a third word is the earliest point at which a possible connection, implied by the first two, is confirmed. If you carry on listing items, say speech-writing experts, you risk being criticised for "going on and on". It can be th

iDailyDiary provides a simple interface that immediately gets you started taking daily notes, creating a journal, putting your thoughts into writing and much more. The iDailyDiary editor is "richtext" with the ability to insert graphics, URL's, Hypertext links and links to other diary pages. iDailyDiary is fully searchable so you can always track down those important dates and reminders.

Recommended by Lifehacker

A free online novel by Catherynne M. Valente, powered by donations.

Every Monday a new chapter is uploaded so the adventure can continue.

catherynne valente

Just how poorly constructed was Sarah Palin?s good-bye speech? V.F. editor Wayne Lawson whips it into publishable shape, with a lot of help from his red pencil.

Vanity Fair copyedits Palin's resignation. She's a moron. If she were a man, I would call her a fucking moron. Oh, but wait! That's a double standard. She's a fucking moron, sorry. We're about equality here.

If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result.

David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" -- "The Mezzanine" by Nicholson Baker

jhkjhljkjlkj,.ml.m,mlm.knm.jnk.j

humorous

Just how poorly constructed was Sarah Palin?s good-bye speech? V.F. editor Wayne Lawson whips it into publishable shape, with a lot of help from his red pencil.

*howling with laughter*

"If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result."

PETA website; great teaching tips

PETA ; english resource

literacy development

harrypotter

English resource

Do you want to become a better writer? Silly question, eh. The good news is that writing makes you a ...

Great blog about writing

Are you on Manager or Maker time?

http://www.whereiwrite.org/ write 2 writing 6 whereiwrite.org

Have you ever wondered where writers actually get to do their writing? Where I Write gives a fascinating glimpse into the creative spaces of professional writers with photos of their work areas.

Where Scifi authors write

Fantatsy and Science Fiction authors - creative spaces and photos of thier work areas

Where I Write: Fantasy & Science Fiction Authors In their creatvie spaces

An interesting project where they document where authors do their writing.

Few people would ever say proof-reading’s fun. Although a good edit does little to invite party hats or balloons, it is essential to effective writing.

10 quick tips on proofing and editing..

With the bio in full bloom right now, it pays to take some time to write yours in a way that that reflects how you want to be perceived. Perhaps you want to show a sense of humor or wit. Maybe you want to show your technical prowess by delivering your bio in a video format. And while you're at it, why not let your bio accomplish some personal branding for you.

Books in the canon that this guy reckons, shouldn't be...

A humorous take on books to skip

here was a time when writers and artists were at the mercy of a few decision-makers who said what was published and what was cast aside. The ease of getting your work online has made those days a distant memory. Blogging about your world, reporting what goes on around you, and even publishing your own art is as easy as setting up a blog or purchasing a domain name and creating your own website. The following free open courseware classes will help you learn about new media, writing, reporting, or even just understanding the culture or your rights as an online publisher.

at Strange Horizons Fiction

"I want to buy a gun," said the Thymomenoraptor. He moved his foreclaw along the glass case of pistols, counting them off: one, two, three, four. "That one." He tapped the case; the glass squeaked.

A short story about awesome dinosaurs, by Leonard Richardson

The best (i.e. only) dinosaur science fiction I've read lately.

Great story of dinosaurs in the modern age.

"Ever since I’ve started blogging about technology a couple of years ago, I’ve been consistently growing an immense feeling of hate towards press releases, and it’s not getting any better. - It’s not that I dislike the PR industry in general, although I often wonder how so many of these firms continue to be in business when the large majority of them have been doing it exactly the same way for the past few decades, instead of evolving."

Ingen ansvarlig voksen ville idag bruge nogle af de ti ord in the first place.

Excellent Excellent Article.

ein without his pipe, George Burns without his cigar or Jackson Pollock without a cig

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2540, or http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2611, or http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2715 want surround.vim: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1697

Interesting article on the future of MS Word and similar apps in an ever increasing cloud world

What will the future look like for office productivity behemoth Microsoft Word in a post-pring, wiki-based world? Ars writer Jeremy Reimer editorializes on whether Microsoft Word will—or will not—adapt to a drastically changed landscape.

Une belle histoire.

touching tribute from a woman who exchanged letters with Hughes in the 80s

This is a beautiful story.

love this...amazing story about love and strength

"Let’s say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. […] Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: 'I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.' But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say 'I don’t love you anymore' and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result."

Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203674704574328920789548170.html?mod=yhoofront

In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with—and sometimes police—their children.

Via ... someone's Twitter feed. The history of handwriting and the death of it. Does it matter that we are no longer tested for penmanship?

Don't blame computers for my chicken scratch. A shift in educational priorities has left an entire generation of Americans with embarrassingly bad penmanship. How much does it matter?

Don\'t blame computers for my chicken scratch. A shift in educational priorities has left an entire generation of Americans with embarrassingly bad penmanship. How much does it matter?

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive.

Started to learn a foreign language, but need to verify your texts by native speakers? You can place your text on CORRECTMYTEXT.COM and language experts will check it! Help other users to check their texts in your native language or language that you know!

check spelling 检查拼写

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

practical tips for writing when you think you can't really write

Dumb Little Man shares ideas to make the everyday person more productive in life. Expect to read tips on finance, saving money, business, and some DIY for the house.

You are not writing for Amazon, or to fit a staff proofreader’s vacation schedule. You are writing for readers. The world is already choking on half-considered, squeezed-out shit. There’s no need to add to the pile. If you want to be great, or at least to be better, start by breathing, taking breaks, and working intensely when the mood is on.

This is interesting, but it's easy to imagine people feeling tired most of the time and there fore always resting

Jeffrey Zeldman shares the simple secret to maintaining quality.

Great piece by Zeldman

"You are writing for readers, a duty as sacred, in its way, as parenting. If you don’t believe the previous sentence, if you think writing is mainly about getting paid, I’m sorry you wasted your time reading this page, and I hope you find another way to earn a living soon. The world is already choking on half-considered, squeezed-out shit. There’s no need to add to the pile. If you want to be great, or at least to be better, start by breathing, taking breaks, and working intensely when the mood is on."

"Write when inspired; rest when tired" –Jeffery Zeldman. Amen.

An example of a great educator seizing and idea and putting it into practice.

Frank McCourt

よく見るとHTML5。

It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place. And, as I said in the talk, I think this often comes down to perceived barriers. Barriers to even the most modest kind of starting. Barriers that seem entirely real, external, and immovable...

Merlin Mann on how to get yourself on task with creative side projects and not rationalize against them using "Real-Life Obligations."

"It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place"

MaxFunCon: Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work (via TSoYA) Here’s the audio from a short talk I presented a few weeks ago at Jesse Thorn’s awesome1 MaxFunCon in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The talk is subtitled, “With All Due Respect

by Merlin Mann

Great talk about overcoming creative barriers and getting stuff accomplished.

"Remember now, we’re not talking about finishing a project or even making something that you know will be the greatest thing ever made. Just starting. What’s the barrier for you?"

An excellent excellent podcast.

los siete pecados de blogear

25 years of PowerPoint. But does it really help us create better presentations?

Useful for teaching presentation skills

An article from the BBC Web site magazine with useful tips on avoiding common problems with PowerPoint (written to celebrate 25 years of PowerPoint)

Don't miss these guys at Copyblogger. It's a gold mine!

from Copyblogger

Interesting article with links to related info

August 19, 2009: Copyblogger writing a great blog post is like running a relay race. Your headline starts the race, but then it passes the baton to your opening paragraph, and its job is done. Sure, it’s important to start the race well, but if the next guy falls on his face, then how well the first guy did doesn’t much matter, does it? Every piece has to do its part.

how to write headlines that get attention

/ Connect, Write, Self-Publish and Promote Your Book - all in one place.

FastPencil is a free service Here's what you can do on FastPencil FREE: •Write and organize your book •Collaborate and share with friends •Format and layout the inside content •Generate a beautiful color cover •Publish to the FastPencil Marketplace •Sell your book on your profile page How do we make money? When you buy and sell published books. We also make money when you purchase additional services like publishing packages, multi-channel distribution or editing. For example, using our free platform you can write, edit and publish a beautiful 100 page paperback book, get one copy printed and delivered to your doorstep for under $10 bucks.

ynesketch follows the same train of thought. It is a software library (Java API) for sensing and creative visualization of textual emotions! Code is serving as a medium between words, emotions, and images; between poetry and painting. Gluing computers with our emotions and aesthetic experiences, it is both a software innovation and an interactive art experiment. Also, it is the first of that kind that is also a free open-source project – not just a closed academic research experiment – so that the whole community can benefit from it. The name ‘Synesketch’ is a portmanteau of ‘synesthesia’ and ‘sketch’ – where ‘sketch’ does not only refer to drawings, but also to the Processing artworks called ‘sketches’.

はてなブックマーク「コンピュータ・IT」カテゴリーの人気エントリーの中には、海外のデザイン系ブログを少し翻訳して転載しただけのものが多く含まれています。そこで、このような記事を1ヶ月書き続けたら、どれだけサイトのアクセス数が増えるのかという実験をしてみました。

はてブと Twitter を使って、1ヶ月で約3万 PV を稼いだ顛末

俺もTwitterで更新通知しよっかなあ

I'm OK; The Bull Is Dead June 21, 2004 (Computerworld) Early in my career, when I worked as an engineer, my boss had a process by which the engineering team was expected to report project status. He insisted that we use the following steps, in the specified order: 1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. "Milestone 4 wasn't hit on time, and we didn't start Task 8 as planned." Or, "Received charter approval as planned." 2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. "Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days." 3. Next steps: The solution, if any. "I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days." 4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. "Two of the five days' delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days' delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem."

Gode vaner i forbindelse med afrapportering på projekter... her er er en artikel jeg tror jeg vil vende tilbage til et par gange - jeg er nemlig ikke så hurtig ...

1. Punch Line 2. Current Status 3 Next Steps 4. Explaination

How to get to the point

Bad: We lost the sense of news that "announcing" implied in the previous version. Because many companies molest their poor followers with repeat postings about the same event, users have become somewhat hardened against event promotions.

A really awesome post about iterating a punchy, credible, and viral TWEET announcement.

NN Group on iterative design of Twitter posts. "The shorter [the text] is, the more important... to design text for usability."

Interesting set of rules to follow, when writing for an online audience.

deploy

interesting study on how tech effects reading

Bases on a Stanford study there is evidence students are writing more than ever and they want to have an audience and purpose. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Ftechbiz%2Fpeople%2Fmagazine%2F17-09%2Fst_thompson

fascinating take on the ongoing trends in literacy. Study by Stanford concludes that today's youth are MORE proficient in writing because they've lived a life of writing for an audience. "We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all."

<<I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization"...For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—& pushing our literacy in bold new directions...The fact that students today almost always write for an audience gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading & organizing & debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms & smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.>>

What’s your role? Are you a designer who needs “real copy” for your comps? Maybe you’re an information architect trying to organize an experience, or a search engine marketer eager to influence your client with keywords they’ll actually use. Whatever your role, a content strategist can help you be more successful.

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

"At a more thematic level, first working through the 'big issues' of content strategy, like communication goals and messaging, can help you hit the mark in your respective deliverables. "

Content strategy thoughts.

The current Inform website

Are tweets copyrightable? This article by Brock Shinen who is a business, intellectual property and entertainment attorney argues that it isn't IF the content that you post via Twitter was not copyrighted to begin with. Facts are not copyrightable. There is also the amount of content that you take from an original work that plays an importance.

A seriously good article on whether you can copyright tweets. Short answer: no.

Short answer: no, with a but; long answer: yes, with a maybe.

'Many people believe they own everything they post online, be it Tweets, Facebook status, or whatever. The truth is that most people are most likely incorrect in their assumption.'

Can you copyright tweets?

writing blogs

40 Freelance Writing Blogs

If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, says novelist Lev Grossman, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work - WSJ.com http://bit.ly/X9oM4 [from http://twitter.com/dcouturepdx/statuses/3680002494]

I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything. He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life. He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let's look at a few examples.”

I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything. He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life. .He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let's look at a few examples.”

5 Tips on How to Write a Killer Slogan (with Interactive Examples)

oh jebus.

How to Write a Short Story http://bit.ly/3O6Mu2 [from http://twitter.com/inti/statuses/3721938391]

With the overload of information and advice still ringing in my ears from a recently attended writers festival and seminar, I thought it might be useful to share a basic “How To…” from my notes.

A sight for creating stories around images.

Storybirds are short, visual stories that you make with family and friends to share and (soon) print.

książka Darwina - animacja rozwoju ksiazki

A visualization of Charles Darwin's edits and additions to On the Origin of Species over the course of six editions. Created using Processing. (via MeFi)

Writing rules

"Many people assume that the same words that work for print campaigns or materials can just be copied and pasted for the web, but that’s just not true. "

keep it short, scanable & know you objectives and target group

Monday August 31, 2009 | HarvardBusiness.org | David Silverman Tags:Business writing, Communication, Networking

Great and simple article on how to revive a lost relationship for a favor.

Gladwell articles

We write papers and have talks mainly to impress others, gain respect, and get promoted.

How to write a research paper

Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, Cambridge

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

Copacabana school site. Also contains resources for other subject areas.

These pages contain links to suitable activities to support

This site contains an amazing collection of English-related web resources sorted into the following categories: Stories/Poems/Rhymes, Reading, Writing, Keyboard Skills, & Grammar/Punctuation/Vocabulary.

This site contains an amazing collection of English-related web resources sorted into the following categories: Stories/Poems/Rhymes, Reading, Writing, Keyboard Skills, & Grammar/Puctuation/Vocabulary.

Collection of links to interacitve web activities that can be used with IWB

Scathing

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't. (By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

Writing a book can be a daunting task, but there are a range of web apps that can help you from start to finish as you attempt to make your novel a reality.

HOW-TO: Write Effectively for Twitter & the Social Web

Want your tweets to be more compelling? Want to be a better writer on the social web? Me too! The advent of social media has opened up a wide range of opportunities for non-professional writers like me — and probably you too — to write online. Most of us writing for websites or blogs or posting on Twitter likely aren’t trained journalists. Even professional writers trained for print must learn to adapt their writing style to an online audience who experiences content differently than a print audience. And social media itself has changed writing online – making it more informal and personal. In fact, when you’re writing online these days, you’re writing not only for your audience but also for search engines and social media sites. Add Twitter to the equation and the need to communicate with only 140 characters raises writing for the social web to a new art form.

Great list of websites that write about how to write effectively for twitter, blogging and other social media sites.

Nice set of links about writing for social media.

Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and even emails. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated weekdays.

As a letter writer myself, I approve! (via Laughing Squid)

"If you follow this article, you should end up with a language that can define functions, call functions, define variables, assign data to variables and perform basic math operations. It will support two basic types, doubles and integers. Some of the functionality is unimplemented, so you can have the satisfaction of actually implementing some of this stuff yourself and get the hang of writing a compiler with a little help."

Tutorial for writing your own compiler

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

similar to a related article suggested by Carter Wiseman

stanley fish

The Lost Symbol, the latest novel by The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, has gone on sale. We pick 20 of the clumsiest phrases from it and from his earlier works. - The critics are certainly harsh. Edinburgh professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum says “Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.” He picks out some excerpts for special criticism. The female lead in Angels and Demons learns of the death of her scientist father: “Genius, she thought. My father . . . Dad. Dead.” A member of the Vatican Guard in the same book becomes annoyed by something, and we learn that "his eyes went white, like a shark about to attack."

Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences

Famously, comedian Stewart Lee mocked him for using the sentence “The famous man looked at the red cup” in his bestselling The Da Vinci Code.

An excellent analysis of whether people actually pay for content -- a point I've made before. And colleagues look at me like I'm crazy.

"In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either."

"Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics. Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper. We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model. The reason they make less money now is that people don't need as much paper. "

When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content...What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for. The first is probably the future of most current media. Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts

Article by Bill Ferris about the top 5 citation applications

very well-written article by Tim Kreider on using alternate life paths as a way of gauging and judging the choices we have made.

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

on how people judge others out of jealousy or fear, and on the different choices we all make, and on how one choice cancels out other choices and on how that's hard. See comments for great discussion.

To play, just use today’s word in context in one of your tweets. That’s it. Your tweet will appear here where people can tell you if they like it. You’ll get points if they like it or retweet it.

The twitter-based Word of the Day competition that helps clever people look clever and helps the rest of us learn new words. .To play, just use today’s word in context in one of your tweets. That’s it. Your tweet will appear here where people can tell you if they like it. You’ll get points if they like it or retweet it.

毎日、「今日の単語」が出題される。その単語を使って美しい文章を作り、Twitterでハッシュタグをつけて投稿すれば、他の人が評価してくれる、という仕組み。

Writing an outline: 30 minutes First draft of content: 4 hours Adding some graphics: 1 hour 30 mins (mostly my boyfriend’s work!) Redrafting and editing, inserting all links: 3 hours Appendix of resources: 1 hour Creating a cover: 1 hour 30 mins Converting to pdf: almost instant! Final proof-read and link-checking: 15 minutes Launching and spreading the word: 1 hour 15 minutes

2009 list

“Writing Wednesdays” Future “Writing Wednesdays” articles will be inspired by quotes from The War of Art.

Nobody wants to read your shit. There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too. What’s your answer to that? 1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form. 2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative. 3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce. You acquire that skill which is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs: the ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of your imagined reader/gallery-goer/customer.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Written for President Nixon, just in case the Apollo 11 astronauts were marooned on the Moon's surface

speech written for case that Aldrin and Armstrong were to stay stranded on the moon

"Columnist and presidential speechwriter Bill Safire was one of only three non-disloyal Jews President Nixon could name. Here is the speech he drafted for Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon!"

Gore attacks edmund again

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace.

to re-read

A rating and discovery engine for bloggers and columnists. Find better writers online

Scribnia is a blog directory that's all about writers. We aim to be the definitive source for people's opinions about bloggers, columnists, reporters, and other writers whose work is available online. Come on in and add your blog to our blog directory!

Bloggers add yourself to the site. Readers review them.

This is quite a treat. Someone got ahold of some scripts from The Wire and posted them online.

original pitch doc in the middle of the page

Some of this is happening already, of course, but a good list nonetheless. “[The anniversary coverage of the Lehman collapse] reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here's a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I'd insist upon if I ran a news organization.”

Journalists need to stop being so lazy and unimaginative. Here are 22 ideas for changing the way news is produced. Ja klar. Wieder mal ein Text, in dem so ein Trainer-Buff, der keine Mannschaft trainiert, sagt, was die anderen Trainer machen sollten, wenn's nach ihm ginge. Das journalistische Reden über Journalismus ähnelt IMMER MEHR diesen sonntäglichen Doppelpassdiskussionen auf DSF, mit dem Unterschied, dass IMMER MEHR Diskutanten wie Udo Lattek sind. Meine Gillmor-Lieblingsregeln lauten: Keine Jahrestagsgeschichten mehr, keine Toptengeschichten mehr, und in Opinionstücken wird das Wort "muss" verboten. Da ist echt gedacht worden. Ich bin sicher, das wird jetzt wieder von 234.525 deutschen Twitteranten retwittert werden.

Journalists need to stop being so lazy and unimaginative. Here are 22 ideas for changing the way news is produced

Sehr lesenswert

Dan Gillmor hat 22 Vorschläge, um die Qualität des Journalismus zu verbessern. Beispiele: Mediennutzer an der Entstehung bzw. Weiterentwicklung von Themen beteiligen, auf Berichte zu Jahres- und Geburtstagen weitestgehend verzichten, hohe Transparenz durch Erwähnen ungeklärter Fragen etc.

Interesting take on the new media and journalism

Das wär so schön, wenn zumindest einiges davon mal wahr werden könnte.

"Journalists need to stop being so lazy and unimaginative. Here are 22 ideas for changing the way news is produced"

The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000

Genre-Fiction Generator

Rules to successfully retweet and gain followers.

With the popularity and ubiquity of writing online, there’s a new demand for web writers. If you’re studying to become a web writer, blogger, or copywriter, there are lots of courses that can offer you the education you need. Read on, and you’ll learn about 50 awesome open courses for web writers.

50 siti per imparare a scrivere, gratis

"Time taken to process an n-word sentence is proportional to n^3, or more." :)

"Here are some thoughts into my process that I hope will give you a framework for writing a blog post (almost) every day."

fresh ideas about blogging everyday

As the author of Beginning Ruby, I make money for every copy sold in print and electronic formats (as well as some miscellaneous income I’ll cover later). It’s not much money – but that wasn’t the motivation for writing the book. In this post I’m going to show you how it all works from my point of view including sales figures, pictures of my royalty statements, information about my advance, and similar gruesome stuff. There’s even a section at the end about how Apress pissed me off a bit (though I don’t regret the experience with them) and why I’m happy with you pirating my book if you so choose.

Nice summary of why you shouldn't give up your day job to write a technical book. The guy is wrong however in thinking he would make more money in giving the ebook away for free. It would be better to give a chapter away for free.

funny cos it's true

The New Yorker

How to improve writing, thinking and learning.

Una presentación en PDF para organizar mejor el texto escrito y a partir de ahí optimizar las ideas y los modelos de aprendizaje. En inglés.

Ethel wore an extremely large pince-nez kept attached by a chain wrapped round her horn. The first thing she ever said to Alicia was: "Tell me, my dear, have you ever let a prince try to fit his glass slipper on you?"

"Brianna refused to dance at all. She threw her ball dress out the window and went riding and said we were oppressed by the tyranny of an unjust patriarchal system. Why isn't she in trouble?"

Faced with compulsory unicorn chaperones and a dozen perfect princesses, Alicia should have just given up and gone home then.

"The slumber test is a great tradition of our Academy," the duchess observed. "My personal friend Aurora of course holds the all-time record. I myself slept for a most refreshing year. I see that you lasted ten minutes, and were discovered creeping down the stairs." "I had insomnia," Alicia muttered. "I was just going to get some hot milk. And perhaps a biscuit."

Can Alicia, a decidedly ordinary princess, pass the Princess Academy and save her kingdom? In which here are unicorns as chaperons, accountants that only look like frogs, and a lot of adventuring.

Hysterical parody of the traditional "fairy-tale princess" story. The characters are believable, even as stereotypes. The plot is good, and the ending does not disappoint. Highly recommended.

A short story by Sarah Rees Brennan

Cory seems to understand the new publishing perspective from an author's point of view as well as anyone

Cory Doctorow kicks off a unique publishing experiment--and a monthly PW column

This makes Overclocked into a fine control for my little experiment. It is a good book. It sold well and was critically acclaimed. But it is solidly a midlist title, a short story collection published by a house turned upside down by bankruptcy. It will be the baseline against which I compare the earnings from With a Little Help. And those earnings will be diverse—like the musicians who've successfully self-produced albums in a variety of packages at a variety of price points (Radiohead, Trent Reznor, David Byrne and Brian Eno, Jonathan Coulton), I have set out to produce a book that can be had in a range of packages and at a range of price points from $0.00 to $10,000.

New publishing experiment by Cory @Doctorow http://tr.im/CxHw via @inkyelbows @bencrowder @1rick [from http://twitter.com/midnighthaircut/statuses/5046801028]

How to Create a Highly Viral Blog

Viral is one of the biggest buzzwords these days in blogging world. Everyone wants to create something viral, so their blog or product will “market itself.” Despite all the buzz about creating “viral content” and a “viral blog,” not many people really understand how this is done. I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure I’ve got it all figured out. There aren’t really any secrets. But, there are a lot of little tactics that can add up to creating something contagious.

some good advice here, if you're into that sort of thing....

The next time you’re thinking about engaging in a technical discussion, run through these questions before you hit the “post” button: 1. Are you responding to facts? With facts? 2. Have you read any primary source materials on the issue you’re discussing? 3. Do you have any first-hand experience with the technologies or ideas involved? 4. Do you have any first-hand experience with those technologies operating at the scale being discussed? 5. Have you contacted the individuals involved in the discussion for further information before making assumptions about their findings? 6. Are you falsely comparing technologies or ideas as if there was a zero-sum competition between them? 7. Are you addressing your peers with respect, courtesy, and humility? 8. Are you sure that what you’re posting is the best way to promote your self, product, project, or idea? Does it demonstrate you at your best?

Don’t waste your life screaming into the void. Make things, measure them, have reasonable and respectful conversations about them, improve them, and teach others how to do the same.

"...why is something you can measure controversial? Are we not engineers?"

Free guide for use of commas and other writing tips.

Rules for when to use and not to use commas.

Skip blithely between tenses: "I sit at my desk with my head in my hands and sighed. It is only three days until the deadline, I think, and Im going to have had to finished everything before then. If only I have finish this now, I thought and lean back on my chair. Just then, the phone has rung. I am answering it."

Write thinly-veiled, self-aggrandising autobiographical fiction: Joe Stockley paced the floor of his office and cursed under his breath. Dammit, he thought, why am I such a brilliant writer that no-one ever understands the depth and complexity of my work?

presentation on how to use comics in the classroom

20 uses for comics in the classroom

Twenty ways to use comics in your classroom

Using comics in the classroom.

7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School - http://ow.ly/x7o1 [from http://twitter.com/JasonThibault/statuses/5243611493]

Good writing doesn’t have to be educated or well supported or even grammatically correct. It does have to be interesting enough that other people want to read it.

There is absolutely no way I’ll be able to make this relevant to tech. But I’m posting it anyway. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, vetoed a California legislative finance bill – AB 1176. The letter is terse and to the point. And the first letter of each line in paragraphs 2-3 are even terser and more to the point.

There is absolutely no way I'll be able to make this relevant to tech. But I'm posting it anyway. Our Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, ...

See us at the Audience Conference, Nov 5-6th in New York » Schwarzenegger Gives California Legislature A Hidden Finger

Find step-by-step help through the writing process and see how master writers craft their work. Publish your writing online.

SUBJECT: HOW TO

Step by step writing help

Sur ce sujet riche et varié, il existe de nombreux blogs et sites, qui, de l’ergonomie éditoriale à l’approche sémantique en passant par les conseils en rédaction web, constituent de solides ressources dont vous pouvez vous inspirer pour améliorer la qualité rédactionnelle de votre blog. J’ai sélectionné pour vous les meilleurs parmi ceux que je connais (mais je ne les connais peut-être pas tous)

Sur ce sujet riche et varié, il existe de nombreux blogs et sites, qui, de l’ergonomie éditoriale à l’approche sémantique en passant par les conseils en rédaction web, constituent de solides ressources dont vous pouvez vous inspirer pour améliorer la qualité rédactionnelle de votre blog. J’ai sélectionné pour vous les meilleurs parmi ceux que je connais (mais je ne les connais peut-être pas tous) :

15 sites incontournables sur l’écriture pour le web et les blogs

digital storytelling resources

digital sorytelling resources

Brilliant list of resources about digital storytelling

for your inner grammar dork/nerd

There are times when blogging can be tough and it feels like we have just run out of ideas for our blog posts or as a freelancer we sometimes think there's

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more **

great suggestions

Excellent list.

A racket of banshees. A congress of ghosts... (h/t TNH)

A vexation of zombies.

"Thousands of different Lego exist, yet when your seven-year-old asks for “a clippy bit,” you know exactly what to hand him. Giles Turnbull surveys a caucus of children." Giles brings utter joy again. (via infovore)

"This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words? Hence, a survey. I asked fellow parents to donate their children for a few minutes, and name a selection of Lego pieces culled from the Lego parts store."

Cute.

The various names that kids call lego pieces. Roland Barthes would smile. s/z

short story website

stories

Nature vs Nurture

David Brooks on why genius is created through deliberate practice.

"The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fjacobian.org%2Fwriting%2Fgreat-documentation%2Fwhat-to-write

The focus is technical documentations, but the style rules are applicable to all web writing.

Livro colaborativo composto de capítulos escritos diversos autores sobre a arte em rede. Os comentários em um capítulo ou em cada parágrafo pode sugerir a atualização do conteúdo.

A networked book about networked art

“A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.” — Institute for the Future of the Book We invite you to comment, revise and translate these chapters. Networked has been designed to incorporate your ideas into the existing chapters. Patrick Lichty’s chapter, Art in the Age of DataFlow: Narrative, Authorship, and Indeterminacy, is a wiki. If you want to change or add to it, simply click on the “Edit Page” link at the top/bottom of every page. The text will appear in an editable window. When you save your changes, the page will immediately reflect them. Readers can then compare the various versions of each page, as one can on Wikipedia.

A networked book about networked art “A networked book is an open book designed to be written, edited and read in a networked environment.” — Institute for the Future of the Book

If Homer's Odyssey Was Written On Twitter

Some profanity

I was about to write “gives third parties the right,” until I realized that there are no third parties because there are no second parties.

Your writing, notes, and to-do lists online. SimpleText.ws stores your text and keeps it synced between your work, home, and devices like the iPhone. Unlike manual syncing, SimpleText.ws merges your changes so you'll never lose data.

E-mail writing

Professional writers spend most days of their adult lives writing. For those among them who specialize on long form non-fiction, their writing is not that different from the types of research papers that plague college students. Assuming that these writers do not want to spend most of the days of their adult lives hating what they are doing, it stands to reason that, over time, they have figured the least painful possible way to schedule a large amount of writing.

I wonder if same can be applied to coding?

Aside from his Nine Stories, JD Salinger published twenty-two stories in various magazines which remain uncollected. Several attempts have been made to compile these stories together but have met stiff resistance by the author. Spanning his literary career between the years 1940-1965, these stories display changes in both the author's style and message. While some are plainly of commercial quality, most are serious works containing an expansive gift of enlightenment and self-examination: that very-satisfying "Salinger moment".

JD Salinger Uncollected Stories

Here are a list of seven things you can do for every web design proposal you write in order to put yourself and your capabilities in the best possible light, and increase the likelihood you'll win the contract.

SitePoint Blogs: News, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers

変わったデザインのエディタ。ちょっとマインドマップっぽい？

瞑想　テキストエディタ

A wise man once said "We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch." With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around. Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today: our capacity to concentrate. Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, reinvindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration. If you are a scriptwriter, blogger, journalist, copywriter, poet or just someone who enjoys writing, welcome back to concentrating.

Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, reinvindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration.

なるほど、きれいなエディタ。 マックはトランスペアレントおおいな。

Critical Mistakes Freelancers Make

There are other mistakes, too; I doubt this list is exhaustive. But I think I have covered the major ones. If you can avoid these, you will be well on your way to increasing your traffic and growing your audience.

Dat kan natuurlijk wel zijn....maar... doe 't maar 's...:-)

Mistake #7: You don’t create catchy headlines. According to Brian Clark, who runs the must-read site, CopyBlogger, “on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.” This means your headlines are the most important thing you write. Fortunately, Brian has an entire series of posts called “How to Write Magnetic Headlines.” I suggest you read every post.

Writing for the web is a challenge. There are usually word length restrictions, the fact that users scan rather than read every word, and sometimes style guides to adhere to. There are enough writing tips online to keep you reading for longer than you probably desire. Here are 1o tips that have been the most useful to me: Know your audience This sounds obvious but is often taken for granted. The only way you can write relevant copy that is targeted at the right audience in the right tone of voice, is to understand who that audience is. Depending on where your audience are located, you may have to include local expressions or if writing for a wide audience be specific with things such as dollars. If it is US dollars then say so. If it is Cardiff in Wales then say so as there is also a Cardiff in New Zealand and other countries.

WTF?

Has a manifesto on how to build a platform for a best-selling book

<p>This online book marketing manifesto is being offered to you as a vehicle to:</p><p>Open your eyes to the massive change that’s happening in the world of book marketing<br />Bust a lot of myths, expose scams and stop you from throwing thousands of dollars away<br />Help you understand how to get the biggest advance possible or self-publish and [...]</p>

mostly applicable to domain specific tech books but interesting to think how this would apply to fiction and non-fiction authorsaik

<p>It’s an amazing dream…<br />You wake up at 2:00am with an idea. A story, a vision for a book. You’ve been writing, journaling, maybe even blogging for years. Pen to paper, fingers to keys…it’s in your blood. You’re genetically compelled to craft literary magic. But, now. Oh now. You’ve finally got the big idea!<br />The one that’s [...]</p>

Reading: 10 Tips for Kicking Ass as a Freelance Writer | Copyblogger: http://bit.ly/Xk2Bc [from http://twitter.com/nickdaws/statuses/2666528238]

Children who blog, text or use social networking websites are more confident about their writing skills, according to the National Literacy Trust. A survey of 3,001 children aged nine to 16 found that 24% had their own blog and 82% sent text messages at least once a month. In addition 73% used instant messaging services to chat online with friends. However, 77% still put real pen to paper to write notes in class or do their school homework. Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as "good" or "very good", while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same. "Our research suggests a strong correlation between kids using technology and wider patterns of reading and writing," Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, told BBC News. "Engagement with online technology drives their enthusiasm for writing short stories, letters, song lyrics or diaries." Mr Douglas dismissed criticisms about the inf

Children who use technology are 'better writers'

Children who blog, text or use social networking websites are more confident about their writing skills, according to the National Literacy Trust.

another ex-American Airlines flyer

ha ha ha

fan entitlement for authors writing series

NOT YOUR BITCH

Neil Gaiman responds to a reader's inquiry about author George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series, and the question of whether it's realistic to have demands on a writer for when their next book will be published.

"George R.R. Martin is not your b****" A succinct castigation of fans who think that they are owed something by the people whose work they follow.

During a rebuild or development of a new site, content strategy engagement is site-level and long-term. First, the content strategist assesses, analyzes, and recommends high-level steps to create more cohesive content. In practice, this means many working sessions with business owners to define big picture objectives, the mission, and editorial program for the site based on the initial content assessment. Once the site goals are understood from a business and user point of view, the content strategist-as-curator works to reframe the collection by creating an overarching strategy that defines how content be should be organized, positioned, and made relevant (think: exhibition rooms in a museum or gallery). We then look at the spectrum of what is available and desired for publication, identify what is premium (the most unique among competitors, desirable to users, and drives high traffic) and work with the business to agree on site-wide topical areas of strength, focus and breadth.

What can we learn from museums libraries and other institutions that manage collections about effective content strategies.

The work is: Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You're five years old. Don't presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it's just one line saying "Never read this again"; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship.

his should be a fledgling historian’s maxim & I wish someone had told me this earlier. When you start out studying history — when you begin as a graduate historian, you are nothing; you are not even the history books you’ve already read, because you’ve probably misunderstood or not appreciated some fundamental aspect of them.

I've long held this philosophy. "You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge."

"Here, there’s one more point I could make: time fine-tunes your collecting habits. You are a predator of sources. Over time, things will start to jump out at you. For a lionness in the savannah on the hunt, the merest movement in the grass is a stimulus to action, but she has learned to distinguish between the random twitches of the landscape and the presence of prey. In the library and the archive, the hunt is as much a matter of skill as of instinct. In short, until you’re an adult lion, jump at everything"

A bit liberal with the profanity, but nevertheless an excellent piece by Paddy Donnelly on the infuriating experience of reading misspelled writing. He's right, of course: if you want anyone to take you seriously you had better learn to spell correctly.

no, really.

preeminent

Good way to advertise products online

Here's how one guy started a successful consulting service by giving away a product to produce social interest in it.

Discrimination based on a person's sex is as alive today as it ever was.

Last week the BBC announced it was to start optimising its headlines in an attempt to gain greater visibility in the search engine results pages, so I thought I’d take a look at journalism and the web. Over recent years, many online news providers have had to adopt search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice into their articles in order to maintain their audience figures. Yet I often see journalists and even some bloggers bemoaning the need to optimise their work, as though it means all the quality has been drained out of the article and replaced with Google-appeasing nonsense. That’s why the first of my points is perhaps the most important. As long as it’s done well, SEO will not make your articles unreadable. SEO is not the enemy of good writing Believe it or not, the purpose of SEO is not to destroy your writing’s artistic integrity, it’s to make sure people can actually find your work to appreciate its genius. I think that SEO is often misunderstood by profe

30.nov.09

That’s why the first of my points is perhaps the most important. As long as it’s done well, SEO will not make your articles unreadable.

How to get your online stuff noticed

hat same simple example also w

A long, thoughtful post about why everything should auto-save all the time, because when you're trying to work, you don't want to be diverting your attention into meta-work at the same time.

by John Gruber - 20 February 2009 - Daring Fireball

A great article of file saving conventions and usability.

"Another is that combat in orbit would be very different from combat in "deep space," which is what you probably think of as how space combat should be – where a spacecraft thrusts one way, and then keeps going that way forever. No, around a planet, the tactical advantage in a battle would be determined by orbit dynamics: which ship is in a lower (and faster) orbit than which; who has a circular orbit and who has gone for an ellipse; relative rendezvous trajectories that look like winding spirals rather than straight lines."

First, let me point out something that Ender's Game got right and something it got wrong. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets' orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we'll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window.

The Physics of Space Battles

I hope someone's working on the simulation.

By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.

ohno! Joe Ades, the peeler salesman of Manhattan has died. RIP. http://bit.ly/ib6Z http://bit.ly/LHCF

great article.

A free online text editor that supports collaborative writing through exchange of a hyperlink

Ether Pad reborn as the PiratePad.

Powered by EtherPad - Etherpad was purchased by Google and it's programmers assigned to the Google Wave project.

an Open Source implementation of Etherpad

= etherpad

This pad text is synchronized as you type, so that everyone viewing this page sees the same text. This allows you to collaborate seamlessly on documents! Hosted by Piratpartiet

"A NON-READER PURSUES A LITERARY EDUCATION ARMED WITH NOTHING BUT THE DON’S TOP EIGHTY-ONE."

There was a time when I fought against an impatience with reading, concealing, with partisanship, the fissures in my education. I confused difficulty with duplicity, and that which didn’t come easily, I often scorned. Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them,” which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.

DONALD BARTHELME

81 new reading ideas.

Tips from Constance Hale.

"Trick #1: Write in English, not Jargon. ... Trick #2: Use specific, concrete nouns. ... Trick #3: Pick action-packed verbs. ... Trick #4: Avoid fluff. ... Trick #5: Find the right pitch."

Trick #2: Use specific, concrete nouns. Nouns are cornerstones of writing—they give us characters, images, and themes. Search for the most evocative and exact. Why choose “house” when the options include cottage, shack, duplex, dacha, bungalow, and bachelor’s pad? (Stay away from abstractions like abode, dwelling, domicile, or residence.) Beware clusters of abstract nouns. When a principal wrote to parents urging a “communication facilitation skills development intervention,” he should have asked them “to help kids write better.” Trick #3: Pick action-packed verbs. All verbs are either static (to be, to seem, to become) or dynamic (to whistle, to waffle, to wonder). Static verbs pour out naturally when we write—“is” clutters most first drafts. But dynamic verbs give writing action, power, drama. Do a verb brush-up on every draft, tossing out static verbs and perking up your prose.

Google's Notebook webapp was tightly integrated with other Google apps, had a killer Firefox extension, and was great at getting things done. "Was," though, because Google is ending support. Here's where heartsick users should turn.

Words sell.

Many copywriting and marketing gurus teach simplistic ideas about psychology. They insist that people can be fully understood and manipulated ...

People are highly complex and often mysterious, so we all struggle to understand our fellow humans. However, now that you’ve gotten over being afraid to sell, here are a few basic psychological tidbits that can help you write compelling copy.

# Do nothing I cannot defend. # Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me. # Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story. # Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am. # Assume the same about all people on whom I report. # Assume personal lives are a private matter, until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise. # Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything. # Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes, except on rare and monumental occasions. # No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously. # And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business."

Do nothing I cannot defend. Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me. Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story. Assume the viewer is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am. Assume the same about all people on whom I report. Assume personal lives are a private matter, until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise. Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories, and clearly label everything. Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes, except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously. And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business.

Last Friday evening, Dec. 4, was the final broadcast of what has been known for many years as The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The following Monday, Dec. 7, the new-look version of the venerable, one-hour, weekday nights, news broadcast made its debut as the PBS NewsHour. Lehrer was still in the anchor chair but his name was gone from the logo and some things had changed.

"The most accurate and important pre-war stories challenging the Bush administration's on-the-record but bogus case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were based on anonymous sources. Many of those stories, in part because they were based on anonymous sources, got buried or underplayed by newspapers at the time. Many of them never got reported at all on television, including the NewsHour. But there are times when there are mitigating circumstances — like internal threats within an administration or maybe jail time for leakers — when some sources must remain anonymous and when editors need to trust their reporters. And often you don't know if the occasion is "rare and monumental" until it is too late"

dell'11/12/2009, di Michael Getler. "One of the things that has not changed, however, is Lehrer's unwavering approach to journalism."

How far does copyright go over the Internet? From this site it goes as far as copyrighting phrases of the English language. Few everyday words drawn together to make a normal phrase with some unhappy campers trying to get them to credit them back for 'stealing' their book title name without permission. Yeah, good one.

article about trademarking of common phrases- what happens when commonly used phrases are copyrighted and you are charged for them? Especially when word of mouth and word of twitter speed up their momentum of use.

@ The Oatmeal

"In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story..."

Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing short stories.

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

too pretty!

Thank you Maira Kalman http://tinyurl.com/ceabnu [from http://twitter.com/mintonmorris/statuses/1164471814]

"The angels are singing on this glorious day."

pretty pretty.

Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.

yAuthor.com is an on-line service with authoring tools allowing authors to create professionally looking interactive content easily. preview release

Outil de création de contenu en ligne. Très bien fait.

yAuthor.com is an on-line service with authoring tools allowing authors to create professionally looking interactive content easily.

professionally looking interactive content

How do you design your content for a Kindle?

In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Bruce Sterling text on design, futurism and stuff.

funny, brilliant man

We create and distribute original Science is Culture content that communicates science's fast-changing place in our culture to an international audience. Our mission is to help nurture a science-savvy global citizenry by increasing public interest in science and public understanding of science.

"Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return." bruce sterling's optimistic piece on what we're collectively in for next.

You are the most important person in the world. Wow, I got you to read the second sentence. Your interest is now piqued and you want to read more. If you do

Idéias para comercial Netlogos

58 of the World’s Greatest Offers — Copyblogger

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.

WALTER In sooth, then, faithful friend, this was a rug of value? Thou wouldst call it not a rug among ordinary rugs, but a rug of purpose? A star in a firmament, in step with the fashion alike to the Whitsun morris-dance? A worthy rug, a rug of consequence, sir? THE KNAVE It was of consequence, I should think; verily, it tied the room together, gather’d its qualities as the sweet lovers’ spring grass doth the morning dew or the rough scythe the first of autumn harvests. It sat between the four sides of the room, making substance of a square, respecting each wall in equal harmony, in geometer’s cap; a great reckoning in a little room. Verily, it transform’d the room from the space between four walls presented, to the harbour of a man’s monarchy.

What if William Shakespeare wrote The Big Lebowski?

Too funny.

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory. Take, for example, the lead story in The New York Times on Sunday, November 8, 2009, headlined “Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House.” There is nothing special about this article. November 8 is just the day I happened to need an example for this column. And there it was. The 1,456-word report begins: Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement. Fewer than half the words in

Michael Kinsley

A proposition that perhaps the length of newspaper articles is what's driving readers to the Internet.

Intros story length

There’s an old joke about the provincial newspaper that reports a nuclear attack on the nation’s largest city under the headline “Local Man Dies in NY Nuclear Holocaust.” Something similar happens at the national level, where everything is filtered through politics. (“In what was widely seen as a setback for Democrats just a year before the midterm elections, nuclear bombs yesterday obliterated seven states, five of which voted for President Obama in the last election …”)

Newspaper articles are too long January 2010

MixedInk takes a fresh approach to collaborative writing. It's a fun, democratic and elegant way for people to weave their best ideas together. (Plus, it's free!)

MixedInk takes a fresh approach to collaborative writing. It's a fun, democratic and elegant way for people to weave their best ideas together.

Free Collaborative Writing Tool

Interesting productivity trick. I think I'll try it out for awhile.

Roger Ebert's poignant piece on what he misses about eating, now that he no longer can.

": Isn't it sad to be unable eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. Everything agrees with me. And so on. What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss."

Roger Ebert talks about no longer being able to eat, drink, or speak.

vonnegut on slaughterhouse five : "On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly the world's most beautiful city. But not me. "

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s letter home describe the real-life Slaughterhouse Five scenario of his POW internment during WWII.

"We will end up with one and a half cities in America -- Washington, D.C., and American Idol. We will all live in Washington, D.C., where the conversation is a droning, never advancing, debate between "conservatives" and "liberals." We will not read about newlyweds. We will not read about the death of salesmen. We will not read about prize Holsteins or new novels. We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is "not a really good piece of fiction" -- Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill. -- two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry."

—By Richard Rodriguez (Harper's Magazine) An obit of the way we used to get news and for the public record keeper.

Twilight of the American newspaper tells the story of San Francisco and its newspapers. And in that tale, a glimpse that we might be losing our sense of place along with the newspaper.

"The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free."

good writing models

story blog promo'd by the starship sofa

ebook, short story, fiction

other entries NSFW or just gross.

This website provides links to articles and other websites related to student online publishing.

A cut 'n' save special: Some of the phrases I see a lot that can easily be replaced with one word without losing meaning are: at all times: replace with always at the present time: replace with now or currently...

How to use one word instead of several.

Phrases that can be replaced with single words.

A cut 'n' save special: Some of the phrases I see a lot that can easily be replaced with one word without losing meaning.

"Some of the phrases I see a lot that can easily be replaced with one word without losing meaning…"

Via Winer; a nice list of longish phrases that can be replaced by a single word without loss of meaning. Useful for Twitter, or, indeed, for any writing.

cut 'n' save special: Some of the phrases I see a lot that can easily be replaced with one word without losing meaning.

A cut 'n' save special: Some of the phrases I see a lot that can easily be replaced with one word without losing meaning For use in twitter

A cut 'n' save special: Some of the phrases I see a lot that can easily be replaced with one word without losing meaning are

Short stories by J. D. Salinger published in The New Yorker

Salinger in the New Yorker.

links to all Salinger stories published in The New Yorker

101 of the Best Movie One Liners Ever

Quote your favorite characters with our handy one-liner movie quote list. Great for speeches, parties, or any occasion.

One-liners. Oooh! The fast and the furious 4 - "Life is simple, you make a choice and then live with it!"

'This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence. This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.'

Writing and photography from the Mojave Desert and elsewhere by Chris Clarke

"This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight."

Hilarious meta-parody!

BEST. BLOG. POST. EVER.

Great sendup of the typical blog post via @andrewsullivan http://j.mp/aQRD4H

There can be more than one bad thing in the world

'what-aboutery'

"Users come for the content." True.

Users do not commonly browse the internet looking for a good design or decent user experience. Users browse the web in search of good content. When it comes to designing a website, content is often overlooked, but why? Very rarely do users browse the web looking for a good design or decent experience. Users come for the content. Not giving them what they want with poorly written content will frustrate users. Not only does it waste their time, but your time as well.

When it comes to designing a website, content is often overlooked, but why? Very rarely do users browse the web looking for a good design or decent experience. Users come for the content. Not giving them what they want with poorly written content will frustrate users. Not only does it waste their time, but your time as well.

TYPEWRITER

Savner du skrivemaskinen, og den manglende muligheten til å rette feil når du skriver? Prøv Typewriter: http://bit.ly/Bo0GD [from http://twitter.com/MacGeeky/statuses/2045765948]

Strategies

Expression usage guide for iPod etc.

The 2008 edition.

"The Apple Publications Style Guide provides editorial guidelines for text in Apple instructional publications, technical documentation, reference information, training programs, and the software user interface." Useful for third party developers as well, especially when you need to reference to some kind of unit/hardware that involves Apple.

Apple publications style guide

Apple's in-house style and usage guide.

i love this.

JK Rowling

inspirational commencement speech

Seed本质上是一个内容管理系统，其运作模式和威客比较类似，也有不同之处。用户在Seed上注册后（目前仅限于美国境内的用户注册），可以查看目前 AOL所需要的各类文章或者原创图片、音频和视频内容等，以及相应的报酬。用户可以接单和提交作品，一旦你的文章或相片被AOL选用，你就会得到相应的报酬。同时，用户还可以像AOL推荐自己的原创作品，同样当AOL选用后，也会得到相应的报酬。

Seed is AOL's open content submission platform where professional writers, photographers and other can submit their content for publication on AOL's leading network of websites.

interesting

great overview: how to blog effectively

How to blog

Quick hints on how to get started

'I called and e-mailed a half-dozen of my favorite bloggers to ask how they blog so well, and I combined their ideas with the best advice from HuffPo. Behold—my own complete guide to blogging.'

But rather than being all about creative flair a good speech-writer uses a number of techniques to get a point across. And these verbal tools are not only useful at the lectern, anyone can use them in everyday situations, from handling a boisterous child to reasoning with a traffic warden. This is because speech-writing is the language of persuasion. And the average day largely consists of trying to persuade people, says Dr Max Atkinson, a communications consultant and author of Speech-Making and Presentation Made Easy.

A brilliant speech can go down in history. But most of us write words the world will never listen to. Can speech-writing teach us skills for dealing with tricky situations in everyday life?

Max Atkinson

Some tips on good speech techniques

Created by retired Capilano College prof Kilian Crawford. A very good list, organized by types of engines, with useful notes on each. I found some useful new engines from this list.

# Mooter: Your results are categorized using a mind map to give your experience a little more variety. # ChaCha: If researching online drains your creativity and inspiration, use the personality-driven ChaCha for help. # Searchbots: This fun search engine lets you personalize your search experience. # Trooker: Browse and search for videos on

“Reading proficiency is just half of the literacy picture, we have to widen the literacy forum to include writing.” – Writing Next Writing Your Way to Wisdom Macomb Intermediate School District Pen&InkWell The need for improved writing proficiency among high school students is significant. Writing well is not just an option for students---it is a necessity. Along with reading comprehension, writing skill is a predictor of academic success and a basic requirement for participation in any higher education endeavor and/ or in civic life. Teachers who attend this training will receive a best practice approach to assist students with “Writing to Learn” and “Learning to Write.” This user friendly approach will be easily transferred into practice by Middle and High School Teachers. Urgency: 21st Century Literacy "Literacy in the 21st century will mean the ability to find information, decode it, critically evaluate it, organize it into personal digital libraries and find meaningful way

Swift training

Strategic Writing Instruction

MISD writing inservice

MISD Writing Instruction

in-service

strategic writing

A Wordy editor will check your text for grammar, spelling, punctuation and structure. Wordy has editors that specialise in a wide range of subjects, which ensures your text will be of the very highest quality.

danish company that does editing with a very quick turnaround

Wordy is the fastest, most reliable way of adding professional copy-editing to your writing process

It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. Now television's most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, but his words have never stopped.

Resource for various online publishing websites

Links for students to publish their writing online

Your school has to have the software Kidspiration

web site on different sites for children and activities.

graphic organizers

Make graphic organizers

Software application from Inspiration that provides a webbing tool with reading capabilities.

Established authors provide writing tips. Elmore Leonard: 'Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said".' Margaret Atwood: "Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do." Roddy Doyle: "Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide." There are many more serious tips, too.

Up-to-Date

Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, our survey of established authors' tips for successful authorship continues.

10 Rules for Writing Fiction - Part 2

The goal here is to take text formatted like this:And render it like this instead:That way, when it's rendered with a nice variable-width font, it ought to look more or less like this: In the above, take particular note of a few points: * "Doublequotes" were correctly translated to “smart” quotes in the order in which they appeared in the source text; * The second opening doublequote in the first paragraph did not cause the opening doublequote in the second paragraph to mis-render out of order; * The "--" em dash on the second was correctly turned into an em dash (—); * Straight apostrophes are not (yet) turned into nice ’s; Beware! Pasting large blocks of text into a textarea in Firefox is liable to take several seconds to complete; Internet Explorer 8 seems to be about the same speed as FF 3.5; and Google Chrome is quite a bit slower. Execution time is mostly dominated by the running time of string.replace() and the overhead of the function call executed for each m

Cleans up plain text for nice formatting and the like

Useful to review or critique docs collaboratively

Share and mark up documents online

Share and mark up documents online | crocodoc - http://crocodoc.com/

Useful for collaboration on documents for teachers and students

Saves to JPEG

Word Clouds R-5

Inc: How Hard Could It Be? By Joel Spolsky

Good article on using blogs for marketing

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.inc.com%2Fmagazine%2F20100301%2Flets-take-this-offline.html

Joel on Software explains what makes a good blog (and why he's quitting)

a website that you can check your spelling and grammar.

check for plagiarism

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I've been an employee of The Atlantic, that I'd eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism [...]

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I’ve been an employee of The Atlantic, that I’d eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism to disclose them all, and that the number of pieces I miss every year far exceeds the number I’m able to read.

Words that Zing

All sorts of cool activities with words - postcards, build a comic, and lots of other games

This website allows kids to learn aout reading and writing. It has a variety of links on it's dite. Each link is a bit different. They are all interactive tools, though.

Graphic organizers and resources for teaching language arts

controllo dello stile

Pre-Grade Your Paper

pleasant backgrounds and sounds in full screen while you have a place to write

"a Windows program designed to increase your productivity and creativity. Its minimalist interface full screen and distraction free, envolves you in a relax and calm atmosphere which stimulate your concentration and creativity in writing."

Full screen text editor distraction free writing enviroment. CreaWriter increase you creativity in writing.

Windows program designed to increase your productivity and creativity. Its minimalist interface full screen and distraction free, envolves you in a relax and calm atmosphere which stimulate your concentration and creativity in writing.

permite hacer un cuento y que se comparta entre distintos alumnos

Collaborative writing tool.

Will You TypeWith.me?

What kind of bike? I don't know, I'm not a bike scientist. What I am though is a manly guy looking to sell his bike. This bike is made out of metal and kick ass spokes. The back reflector was taken off, but if you think that deters me from riding at night, you're way wrong. I practiced ninja training in Japan's mount Fuji for 5 years and the first rule they teach about ninja biking is that back reflectors let the enemy know where you are. Not having a rear reflector is like saying "FUCK YOU CAR, JUST TRY AND FIND ME".

Best bike ad ever. i just want to meet this dude.

metal and kick ass spokes

Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way. The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in Wikipedia or Perish

Every day, hundreds of articles appear in academic journals and very little of this information is available to the public. Now, RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. As Nature reports, this is the first time an academic journal has forced its authors to disseminate information this way. The initiative is a collaboration between the journal and the RNA family database (Rfam) consortium led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Helps students think of cool fun new story subjects

Fun, with links to pics

<[A-Z]{2,}>

Lifehacker - Find All the Acronyms in Word Documents - Microsoft Word http://twurl.nl/vqizla [from http://twitter.com/znth/statuses/1849171774]

"Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language."

worth a glance, but it's the Brits' fault that they cannot spell things correctly. Use wrong size paper too!

Users pay attention to details in a site's writing style, and they'll notice if you use the wrong variant of the English language.

Unit

Publishing a short run magazine used to be a rather pricey and labor-intensive process. MagCloud is an inexpensive way to bring your specialty magazine to press without hefty upfront fees.

from "Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance"

Good to know. Everybody's Broke! lolol

PageRank is a standard and much discussed topic in SEO and while it is relevant, the methods and techniques discussed are often not. There is a lot of

SEO optimization articles

fun

a must-read

lame gedicht, wel tof idee om iets te doen rond bewegen en computer.

State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail.

NOT JUST ENGINEERS

Amazing discussion of Cuils with the final decision that they will be represented by the interrobang ‽.

comments on Police raids reveal 'baby farms'

Ahhhh, the level of absurdity has restored my humors. I am reborn as an ocelot.

The first thing I do when I want to cut out some words is not read the original version. I just write a new one.

DETTE er copywriting av høg klasse og teksttrimming med riktig fokus: Kort og handlingsorientert, dvs selgande.

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain An example of rewriting text to be shorter and more focused.

More blog thinking.

What an Executive Blog Editor Needs to Know-tips for blog building (Chris Brogan) http://twurl.nl/ulgrkw [from http://twitter.com/markivey/statuses/1418232817]

Leonard uses Tiddlywiki for worldcreation; I'd be curious whether any authors are now using Flashbake

Even Cory Doctorow's using Git .)

Una critica excelente sobre las pelis de Michael Bay.

I love this review of T:RotF(L). It's mostly how I felt about the first one. I don't understand how people who claim to care about the Transformers aren't outside Bay's house, pitchforks-and-torches angry about this tragic wasted opportunity.

Im reading awesomely funny transformer 2 reviews here http://tinyurl.com/ml7fvq and here http://tinyurl.com/lgeccr [from http://twitter.com/madguy000/statuses/2386018884]

this review is amazing: http://io9.com/5301898/michael-bay-finally-made-an-art-movie?skyline=true&s=i

This is the greatest film review I have ever read.

The greatest movie review ever.

Grammaropolis is a fresh, fun, and exciting new way to learn about the parts of speech.

Grammar website for kids

Grammaropolis is a fun find that helps students learn the parts of speech. In Grammaropolis, all of the characters are a different part of speech. Students will “meet” Adverb, Linking Verb, Pronoun, Adjective, Preposition, Slang, Noun, Conjunction, Interjection, and Action Verb.

great grammar music video. simple explanations of parts of speech

Animated personified parts of speech with stories, songs, and games to help kids learn about grammar.

This is a great way to teach grammar to students in a way that they will never forget

I care about this alot

The Alot is Better Than You at Everything As a grammatically conscientious person who frequents internet forums and YouTube, I have found it necessary to develop a few coping mechanisms. When someone types out "u" instead of "you," instead of getting mad, I imagine them having only one finger on each hand and then their actions seem reasonable. If I only had one finger on each hand, I'd leave out unnecessary letters too!

I want my own alot.

The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people's grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I'd normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world. For example, when I read the sentence "I care about this alot," this is what I imagine:

We have discovered more than a half dozen passages in the forthcoming book that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources.

Did Chris Anderson plagiarize from Wikipedia

blog commenters include the Chris Anderson

I spent several years behind a desk at an employment agency. The first thing we would ask any client was how recently they had updated their resume. The

(1)主張を書いて！ (2)理由を書いて！ (3)（構造化の）階層をそろえて書いて！ (4)概要と詳細に分けて書いて！ (5)一言で表現して！ (6)抽象的な表現でなく，具体的に言って！ (7)省略をしないで書いて！ (8)事実と意見は分けて書いて！ (9)論点を明確にして！ よい文章を書くための6力 (1)確実に伝える〜論点絞り力 (2)納得させる〜論理的記述力 (3)一目で認知させる〜構造化力 (4)理解しやすくする〜平易表現力 (5)正確に伝える〜正確表現力 (6)少ない文章量で伝える〜短文表現力

文章を見ると思わず言ってしまうこと (1)主張を書いて！ (2)理由を書いて！ (3)（構造化の）階層をそろえて書いて！ (4)概要と詳細に分けて書いて！ (5)一言で表現して！ (6)抽象的な表現でなく，具体的に言って！ (7)省略をしないで書いて！ (8)事実と意見は分けて書いて！ (9)論点を明確にして！

「よい文章を書く技術」

なるほど「駄目でない」文章ね

「よい文章」とは「駄目でない文章」

essay by Clive James

Are we able to think clearly when surrounded by mess because chaos is inherent in all our minds, even those of the great writers and thinkers?

Fiction Rule of Thumb

The probability that a book is good decreases as the number of words made up by the author increases.

TypePad for Journalists is a new program from Six Apart, the company whose Movable Type and TypePad publishing platforms, Six Apart Media advertising, and Six Apart Services team help power many of the most successful media companies in the world.

(Formerly the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program). Moveable Type is helping out journalists and community alike by offering free accounts to journalists who have recently lost their jobs, and those who recognize journalism is going online and would like a stronger web presence. A+ move!

What started as a gag has evolved into something actually quite interesting - not least when it eventually expands to countries outside N America.

レイオフされたジャーナリスト向けに無償でブログを提供して利益を共有するしかけ

Journalist Bailout Program!

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

10 phrases that kill a resume

Retour sur les bancs de la FAQ http://bit.ly/cvUxjq

An exploration of the whys and wherefores of website FAQs. (Maybe you shouldn't need one.)

Make books your way! Share with the world. •Free to Make & Publish books •Bookstore Quality Books, Buy One or Many •No Software, Easy Book Builder, 100% Online

Makes interactive, online books, including digpix, uploaded graphics. Start from word files, PowerPoint slides, or templates. Shared by URL. Printed copies of books can also be ordered (for a fee).

Longform: a blog featuring articles that are too long and too interesting to be read in browser - http://bit.ly/9I3iy0 – Smashing Magazine (smashingmag) http://twitter.com/smashingmag/statuses/12943081216

some great articles collected here

非常简单的一个blog模板，以后学习。

A neat idea for long blog posts.

Ha, Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays: http://j.mp/9wI13t

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. -- BEST EVER.

bad bad bad awesome!

Conjugating verbs can be a challenge for people learning the English language. Conjugation.com aims to help those people learning English. Type a verb into the Conjugation.com engine generates a list of ways that verb can be conjugated. Conjugation.com also provides examples of your chosen verb being used in a sentence. Conjugation.com provides a widget that you can embed into your blog or website for visitors to use. To install the widget click the conjugation.com on your site link, copy the code provided, and paste it into your blog's template. Applications for Education Conjugation.com could be useful for ESL/ELL students as well as native speakers of English who struggle with verb conjugation. If you have students contributing to a group blog, the Conjugation.com widget could be a good asset to add to the group blog. - Free Technology for Teachers

English Verb Conjugation - THE ORIGINAL verb conjugation website. 15000 verbs conjugated in all modes, affirmative, interrogative, negative, in all persons, tenses, voices, and forms. Results automatically displayed for all regular verbs, irregular verbs, and modal verbs.

When I heard that my novel The Golden Compass (the name in the USA of Northern Lights) appeared in the top five of the American Library Association's list of 2007's most challenged books, my immediate and ignoble response was glee.

Censorship is a terrible thing. So thank goodness it never works, says Philip Pullman.

In fact, when it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones. My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Censorship is a terrible thing. So thank goodness it never works, says Philip Pullman

Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones. My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

"My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good."

Censorship is a terrible thing. So thank goodness it never works, says Philip Pullman

Guidelines for Writing a Good About Page - http://bit.ly/9Yeieb – Smashing Magazine (smashingmag) http://twitter.com/smashingmag/statuses/13308551228

Writing an about page

Elements Of Twitter Style - http://goo.gl/d5yK

"Red Sweater Blog – Elements Of Twitter Style" http://j.mp/dwInoi

Advice on writing tweets and using Twitter.

All of this is just saying that the gender roles were both an intellectual and personal interest of mine because the ideals about - I'm a human being and I've been poured into this body, so who am I? Am I really wired differently? Why do I have such different expectations for my life than a woman has? Why should I? Why should I have a different expectation? I shouldn’t. I feel like we're back in college and we could have a rap session about this. You know, are you born this way? Is it nature/nurture?...

Long interview with Matthew Weiner of Mad Men; lots of new details about how he shapes the series

A Q&A with the creator of Mad Men: "What I’ve tried to do is have some honesty about it, show the jobs that they were in and show my world, which is white. It’s the story of the show. And these people are not glorified but (I’ve tried to) show the parallel universe of it all. And the idea of following one of those characters home is a possibility. I’ve slowly been trying to integrate these worlds together the way it actually happened. There’s no enmity. There’s no blatant racism. You never hear anybody say anything about black people that’s like Jim Crow or anything. It’s New York City. But it was segregated and it was two parallel universes and rather than do the television thing of “Hey they’re best buddies”... Don is a fair person but "Everybody's good buddies and here's my black friend" was not the world of the '60s."

Long interview with the creator of Mad Men - but too many spoilers to read now.

long interview with Matthew Weiner of Mad Men; lots of new details about how he shapes the series

Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.

Heather Havrilesky, fantastic article and reader responses. God, I love Heather.

Nov. 7, 2008 | Dear boomers: We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years. We apologize for scoffing at your earnestness, your lack of self-deprecation, your tendency to take yourselves a little too seriously.

"Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it... When we watched Barack Obama's victory speech on Tuesday night, we looked into the eyes of a real leader, and decades of cynicism about politics and grass-roots movements and community melted away in a single moment. We heard the voice of a man who can inspire with his words, who's unashamed of his own intelligence, who's willing to treat the citizens of this country like smart, capable people, worthy of respect. For the first time in some of our lifetimes, we believed."

FAQ QA

Couldn't Agree More!

Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal?

One of my favorite phrases in the business world is full-service solutions provider. A quick search on Google finds at least 47,000 companies using that one. That's full-service generic. There's more. Cost effective end-to-end solutions brings you about 95,000 results. Provider of value-added services nets you more than 600,000 matches. Exactly which services are sold as not adding value? Who writes this stuff? Worse, who reads it and approves it? What does it say when tens of thousands of companies are saying the same things about themselves?

David Foster Wallace

A complete list of words that David Foster Wallace circled in his American Heritage Dictionary.

"LaTeX Lab is an open source implementation of a web based LaTeX editor for Google Docs."

RT @t_hayashi: というか Google によるオンライン版 LaTeX がプレヴューリリースされてた！http://bit.ly/9EpB2D

wikiHow article about How to Be Creative.

A good explanation of how to create a podcast

“Proofreading is vitally important, hard to do well, and tedious as hell.” ~Brian Clark That’s the best quote I’ve ever heard about proofreading, but I’d like to extend Brian’s remarks a bit. In fact, I’ve got 14 tips that are just about guaranteed to make you a better proofreader, and maybe make the task a tad less terrible. Ready? You’re still watching for those typos, right?

Not just for editors!

use to find good images for blog posts

by Sonia Simone

Very nice article on different writing systems.

The beauty of typography has no borders. While most of us work with the familiar Latin alphabet, international projects usually require quite extensive knowledge

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic & Brahmic Characters

I'm a fan of Tim Ferris , author of The Four Hour Work Week . Given this, you can imagine my horror when I found out via this video that Tim doesn't do much of his text editing in Word. Not big on documents (in the traditional sense of the word) and more

We know that some folks have a very discrete writing process. They write, then they edit, and then they review/format/finalize. If you want to "just write," and minimize any possible distractions, you've got a couple of options before ditching Word.

I'm a fan of Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week. Given this, you can imagine my horror when I found out via this video that Tim doesn't do much of his text editing in Word. Not big on documents (in the traditional sense of the word) and more about simply composing text for blogs etc, Tim is a fan of a very basic text editor that emulates the word processors of yore. Also, living his message of laser sharp focus on "major tasks," Tim is all about writing, and only writing. We're talking black screen, green text, no "distracting" buttons etc.

Dave Navarro's thoughts on getting visitors to stop what they’re doing, give you their undivided attention and take the immediate action you desire.

Get someone to read every word? Isn't that impossible these days? It's not impossible if you put your mind to ...

Lots to absorb but an excellent resource to return to when the muse is fighting back.

RT @tcea: New #animated #comiccreator called #Stage'd available at http://stagedproject.com/. Use it to create #3D digital plays!

From Kelly Tenkely: Stage’d is a tool that helps students to tell digital stories in a new 3-d way. Students can create a stage full of characters and dialogue as if they are directing their own digital play. They can choose characters, costumes, animations, set design and provide characters with dialog. When the 3-d comic has been saved, it can be emailed or linked to with a unique url. Stage’d is perfect for use in any classroom, to save a comic requires no personal identifying information or even an email address. All students have to do is type in the name of the director (first name only or a pseudonym)."

Staged is a very simple to use 3D comic design webtool that allows students to create animated comic strips that speak with speech bubbles. It would be a great way to have students act out a scene from a novel or history.

create a 3C comic

A digital toy for creating animated comics.

via kottke.com, dozens of links about the late writer, david foster wallace

A collection of links to resources related to, anecdotes about, and eulogies of the deceased author. NB: he loved The Wire!

Jason Kottke assembled a set of links commemorating DFW.

kottke's list of remembrances, because I, too, need to close some of these tabs

Kottke rounds up quite a few links about David Foster Wallace, the acclaimed writer that died recently. I've never read anything by Wallace, but all the outpouring of sorrow makes me wonder if I should have been.

Optimiser ses courriels

Write me a story: Kids read (and vote on their favorite) and write short stories on this kid-friendly site

Use the prompts to write your own story online and submit it. It might be published the next week!

students can practice their writing skills, stretch their imaginations, read fun stories, and maybe even get published on the Internet! Each week students are challenged to write a story using a preselected character, place, and prop. Five stories are randomly selected each week and showcased in the Web site’s Stunningly Stupendous Stories section the next week.

Students can write their own stories and comment on other students writing

Each week this site gives a character, place and prop and asks you to create a short story.

for letter applications

SHARED USING: http://www.tagle.it

This list of 100 free open courseware links can help you improve your essay-writing, fiction, blogging, and even managing your own small business.

RT @TechCrunch Who the Hell Is Enrolling in Journalism School Right Now? http://tcrn.ch/bIMbeL

article is trash, go straight to the comments for insight.

Who the Hell Is Enrolling in Journalism School Right Now?

the "getting an MBA look smart" video Sarah Lacy links to here may have a valid point, but again, she doesn't make a point http://is.gd/rs0W [from http://twitter.com/steveray/statuses/1479289839]

Interesting article on the supposedly changing face of journalism. Consider the source, though: a self-professed journalist who never learned how to be a journalist. She also mocks people without jobs and those who earn less than her. What a fucking bitch.

"One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. " / "The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions. The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win."

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter. The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions. The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.

"The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win." - think about this

『長音記号を省いて「ブラウザ」「エントリ」とするのは、美しくない上にもはや正しくもない。』という部分が納得いかない。これが文系と理系の違いか？

わかりやすい文章を書くにはどうすればいいか

知性のある文章は、それが「伝わるかどうか」だけを考えれば良いというものではない。それが「どう伝わるか」ということも考えのうちに入れておかなければならない。 そこで重視されるのがスピードだ。それがパッと直感的に伝わるのか、それともじわじわ染み込むように伝わるのか、そこに気を遣えるのが知性のある文章だ。 例えば、「辛い」という言葉がある。これは「つらい」とも「からい」とも読めるから、直感的にはどういう意味かは伝わらない。だから、スピードを重視したいのに「辛い」と書くのは知性のない文章だ。なぜなら、そこでは意味が直感的に伝わらないため、どうしてもスピードが落ちてしまうからである。この場合は、ふりがなを振るか、もしくはひらがなで書くのが、伝わり方に気を遣えた、すなわち知性のある文章ということになるだろう。

概ねあっているようにも見えるが、微妙に「どうかな」と言う気もする。75点

A listing of 50 entertaining and educational blogs that deal with writing tips, words of the day, and grammar. A resource for writers of all kinds.

"The Orphan is a non-profit, biannual, web-only entity devoted to demolishing literary preconceptions."

literary/ arts webzine

The Orphan is incomplete, unpublishable, moloch-less, disrespected, bizarre and roundly rejected.

Jim Carrey profile

cool article on the existential nature of jim carrey's comedy

To quote Martin Buber: “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable."

article about jim carey

jim carrey, the existential clown!

Why Jim Carrey makes us uncomfortable

All week, Technorati is releasing data from its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. On Monday, Technorati told us that bloggers only need 100,000 visitors a month to make $75,000 a year (yeah, right). Today, it offers up something more believable: the more you post, the higher you are likely to rank on Technorati.

METRICS!

All week, Technorati is releasing data from its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report. The more you post, the higher you are likely to rank on Technorati.

Here’s how it works: Blogs and mainstream media sites are indexed by Google very frequently. Many times per day, in fact. And those sites often have great Page Rank already. Combine that regular indexing and Page Rank with Google’s recent policy of ranking news type results higher than older, evergreen stuff, and you have a system ripe for abuse. Let’s say I run a popular political or celebrity gossip site (two topics that pop up a lot on Google Trends). I look for hot queries that people are typing in right now, for whatever reason. Then I write a blog post, making sure to use the query term in the title of the post (which weights heavier for matching content to specific queries). The content of the article itself is mostly irrelevant, as long as your normal readers don’t gag on it. Within a few minutes that content is indexed by Google, and the high Page Rank of the site along with the newness of the content pushes it up towards to top of the first page of results. Possibly all th

Extremely useful reading for PR practitioners mapping the new world of interactions within a modern era of 2.0

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more ** Source The press release is over 100 years old and for the most part, its evolution is mostly stagnant for the majority of its

Have you ever heard of "Content is King"? Then look no further. We will explain everything.

Ambitious journalists don’t have to worry about affording extra education when free open courses are available for anyone to take online. Spend some time studying and exploring the various aspects of journalism with these classes before forging your own future as a journalist. These courses will help you learn about writing, reporting, photojournalism, multimedia, and more.

--These courses will help you learn about writing, reporting, photojournalism, multimedia, and more.

The Kuru Toga is a self-sharpening mechanical pencil that solves a problem that's inherent with normal mechanical pencils.

Self Sharpening Lead. Way Cool. Hard to find.

Writing Technical Documentation with Sphinx, Paver, and Cog.

I knew in the back of my mind that Doug Hellman had a sphinx workflow for his blog posts. Now, how did I not notice how close it was to my needs? Includes lots of tasty tips for tweaking output etc

"Writing Technical Documentation with Sphinx, Paver, and Cog I've been working on the Python Module of the Week series since March of 2007. During the course of the project, my article style and tool chain have both evolved. I now have a fairly smooth production process in place, so the mechanics of producing a new post don't get in the way of the actual research and writing. Most of the tools are open source, so I thought I would describe the process I go through and how the tools work together."

"...a bunch of good writing on weblogs, creative work, and online media."

"Merlin Mann has been on a tear lately. He's been rethinking what he wants to do with 43 Folders -- a site he started four years ago to think in public about Getting Things Done (and other stuff) -- which rethinking has resulted in a bunch of good writing on weblogs, creative work, and online media. Some links and excerpts follow."

In his celebrated 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, titled "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that a day would come when America would end what he called "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands." His prediction came true in the twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Jesus and Swedenborg. But I think that Emerson would have had mixed feelings about one consequence of the advance of science here and abroad—that it has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.[1]

Without God By Steven Weinberg Charles DarwinCharles Darwin by David Levine In his celebrated 1837 Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard, titled "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that a day would come when America would end what he called "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands." His prediction came true in the twentieth century, and in no area of learning more so than in science. This surely would have pleased Emerson. When he listed his heroes he would generally include Copernicus and Galileo and Newton along with Socrates and Jesus and Swedenborg. But I think that Emerson would have had mixed feelings about one consequence of the advance of science here and abroad—that it has led to a widespread weakening of religious belief.[1]

He warned me that we must worship God, because otherwise we would start worshiping each other. He was right about the danger, but I would suggest a different cure: we should get out of the habit of worshiping anything.

How to write technical documetns: overview, API document, walkthrough...

by mike lacher.

via jmb. perfectly expressed font essay

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from “Web site” to “website” (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow.

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from “Web site” to “website” (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow. Among the more interesting changes –- at least from a grammar and style standpoint –- are separating out “smart phone” as two words, hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend and follow to be used both as nouns and verbs. Beyond that, the AP has also defined a number of acronyms that are commonly used in texting and instant messaging. While most of them should be fairly well-known to regular web and mobile phone users (ROFL, BRB and G2G are among the definitions) one actually was new to me: POS.

The New York Times recently published a list of 50 fancy words that most frequently stump their readership. They are able to measure this data thanks to a nifty in-page lookup mechanism, which you can try here. Try double-clicking the word “epicenter”.

Social Media Examiner

hasticity, which is the science of random chance, and they talked to someone who

There's whatever the story appears to be about—the financial crisis, evangelical Christianity, cryogenics—and then there's what it's actually about. And what it's actually about is, as often as not, wrongness.

Ira Glass on the narrative power of being wrong

Need catchy blog post ideas?

Need catchy blog post ideas?Click the "Generate" button to create more linkbait! To use your own subject enter it below

Need catchy blog post ideas? Use linkbait generator

Generate all the linkbait you could ever want!

10 reasons why Bruce Willis is an idiot

The beauty of writing systems is that each has something unique from which to draw inspiration. Two weeks ago, in the first part of this article, we covered Arabic and East-Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) and a few Indic scripts (Devanagari, Thai and Tibetan).

Learning and using new words can be one of the great pleasures of language. While university courses can help you to build your vocabulary, seeking out words, wordplay, and information is essential to becoming a true word nerd. These online tools can help you along, making it simple to learn new words, find out where they came from and just plain play with words.

Create a flipbook

A flip book maker! Possibly for primary school usage?

Read Write Think provides teachers, particularly reading and writing teachers, with a wealth of information and teaching resources. One neat resource of theirs that I recently learned about through Doug Peterson is their flip book maker. Read Write Think's flip book maker provides a template for students to use to create and print a ten page flip book. Students can use the flip book maker to design pages that contain various combinations of text and images. The flip book maker provides drawing tools that students can use to create original drawings to illustrate their stories.

http://www.stevenlittledesign.com/

via Lisa Bledsoe

ideas for making the home page content and article teasers better

Copywriting

"design and copywriting are two sides of the same coin; inseparable in every way"

【deli_post】The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design | Design Shack http://goo.gl/NBAf #deli_post

ideas for making the home page content and article teasers better

Copywriting

【deli_post】The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design | Design Shack http://goo.gl/NBAf #deli_post

ideas for making the home page content and article teasers better

Copywriting

【deli_post】The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design | Design Shack http://goo.gl/NBAf #deli_post

ideas for making the home page content and article teasers better

Copywriting

【deli_post】The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design | Design Shack http://goo.gl/NBAf #deli_post

ideas for making the home page content and article teasers better

Copywriting

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

So you want to be an epublisher.

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it's even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you've glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children's books, and gone into hock re-

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself?

Epublishing howto - indispensable advice

You scream, I scream, we all scream for epubs. As with all internet bounty, it’s even more exciting to produce than to consume. So after you’ve glutted yourself on all those free Jane Austen novels and children’s books, and gone into hock re-creating your library on iPad, why not give something back by doing a little writing yourself? What to write about, how to ensure quality, and how to identify and market to an audience are beyond the scope of this little post, but we can point to some dandy resources that tell how to create and test your epub. So let’s go!

A great essay on writing, especially large projects.

"There’s a painful threshold when you’re roughly two-thirds of the way through the book where you need an extra shove. My advice is to not write an article about this experience, but rather print out the whole damned book. That’s right. Every single page. If you haven’t already invested in a home laser printer, now is the time. You’re almost an author, dammit. Seeing all of your work spread out on the floor of your office is cathartic."

STILL NEED TO READ

"She was certainly not the first person I’d heard this from. I hear this almost everywhere I go where there are people talking about social media, and I feel that it is time that I rise up against it. In fact, I did, right there and then. I grabbed the microphone from her grasp and said, 'I am not a brand' ... Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation."

Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation. They think the message only goes one way—out. Things must be shouted. Things must be thrust in your face. Things must be sold.

The Internet is about conversation, not about branding or selling.

RT @peteashton The most important thing you will read about Social Media this week: http://bit.ly/ckRInQ – Andrew Dubber (dubber) http://twitter.com/dubber/statuses/16814698958

Author on social media.

The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone.

anti-branding manifesto

// I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to *commodify* everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird. // i cry with laughter and i love her ♥♥♥

A great essay on writing, especially large projects.

meh, two more blog posts analyzed by http://iwl.me results in Jonathan Swift & Stephen King. Methinks results a bit random. #unimpressed

"Check what famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers."

"Check what famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers. Any text in English will do: your latest blog post, journal entry, Reddit comment, chapter of your unfinished book, etc. For reliable results paste at least a few paragraphs (not tweets)."

I Write Like http://iwl.me/ your writing style is like... (via @catone)

Even in this example, I personally have no problem with using we.

#!/bin/bash weasels="many|various|very|fairly|several|extremely\ |exceedingly|quite|remarkably|few|surprisingly\ |mostly|largely|huge|tiny|((are|is) a number)\ |excellent|interestingly|significantly\ |substantially|clearly|vast|relatively|completely" wordfile="" # Check for an alternate weasel file if [ -f $HOME/etc/words/weasels ]; then wordfile="$HOME/etc/words/weasels" fi if [ -f $WORDSDIR/weasels ]; then wordfile="$WORDSDIR/weasels" fi if [ -f words/weasels ]; then wordfile="words/weasels" fi if [ ! "$wordfile" = "" ]; then weasels="xyzabc123"; for w in `cat $wordfile`; do weasels="$weasels|$w" done fi if [ "$1" = "" ]; then echo "usage: `basename $0` <file> ..." exit fi egrep -i -n --color "\\b($weasels)\\b" $* exit $?

Kill weasel words, avoid the passive, eliminate duplicates

10 writing tips everyone can benefit from: http://bit.ly/bSS1zX (h/t @kottke)

ooo! gonna come back to this: 10 rules for writers http://bit.ly/9ytXAU (via @jkottke) #bookmark

1. Write the sentence, not just the story. 2. Pick a better verb. 3. Kill the cliché. 4. Variety is the key. 5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses. 6. Use the landscape.  7. Smarten up your protagonist.  9. Write in scenes.  10. Torture your protagonist.

Some of the best creative writing advice I have seen

1. Write the sentence, not just the story 2. Pick a better verb 3. Kill the cliché. 4. Variety is the key. 5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses. 6. Use the landscape. 7. Smarten up your protagonist. 8. Learn to write dialogue. 9. Write in scenes. 10. Torture your protagonist.

Good rules for any writer.

Click here to find out more!

Parisians call it a gruyère. For hundreds of years, the catacombs under the city have been a conduit, sanctuary, and birthplace for its secrets. The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables’ Jean Valjean both haunted these tunnels, striking students descended in 1968, as did patriots during the Second World War. The Nazis visited too, building a bunker in the maze below the 6th arrondissement. Honeycombed across 1,900 acres of the city, the vast majority of the tunnels are not strictly speaking “catacombs.” They house no bones. Limestone (and, to the north of the city, gypsum) quarries, these are the mines that built Paris. The oldest date back two thousand years to Roman settlers, but most were excavated in the construction boom of the late Middle Ages. Riddling the Left Bank, these tunnels were at first beyond the city’s southern limits. But as Paris’s population grew, so did the city—and soon whole neighbourhoods were built on this infirm ground.

this is really, really cool. On August 23, 2004, they discovered a cinema sixty feet beneath Paris.

RT @ebertchicago: The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock: The Secret City Beneath Paris. http://bit.ly/93gYTB

crazy french secret society does cool things in the catacombs, doesn't want publicity, fame, attention

Kevin Kelly is asking people to recommend the best magazine articles ever written. Too much good stuff to read. Excellent.

* Susan Orlean, "Orchid Fever" in The New Yorker, January 23, 1995

quick tool for writing notes and uploading attachments

Write.fm is a dead simple application that allows you to share text between computers and in the cloud. I really focused on ease of use with this app – there are hardly any elements on the page and the only action required by the user is to start typing. There is no need to “save” as its all done automatically.

Save files to the cloud

Share text and files easily

quick tool for writing notes and uploading attachments

Write.fm is a dead simple application that allows you to share text between computers and in the cloud. I really focused on ease of use with this app – there are hardly any elements on the page and the only action required by the user is to start typing. There is no need to “save” as its all done automatically.

Save files to the cloud