Category Archives: Writing

The Fact Checker’s Bible

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If you have time please go to your local library or book store and look for Sarah Harrison Smith’s The Fact Checker’s Bible. Incidentally, in Spanish the library is called La Biblioteca and the book store La Libreria. Anyway, for writers and bloggers this is quite a helpful book but I think more for bloggers.

Why?

Well Bloggers are not only writers but also the editor, photographer and publisher of the blog.

Smith discusses in the detail and argues for the practice of fact checking in writing, editing and publishing.

Why is fact checking important?

A factual error can be significant or insubstantial. Significant – A writer may stray from the facts when doing report or doing a commentary piece. And it compromises the article/post and might even open the author and the publisher to legal action. Insubstantial – Could be an error in time, place or even gender.

There are probably two effects or outcome brought about by errors:

First, It opens the writer and publisher (both roles played by blogger) to legal action and censure.

Second, It makes the reader more cynical. Your authority and reputation as a writer and publisher (Blogger) will be dimimished. One expects and should not be surprised by skepticism from the readers. But to accumulate skepticism in your readers is bad news.

The book is The Fact Checker’s Bible: A Guide to Getting it Right by Sarah Harrison Smith.

Originally posted on August 30, 2009 @ 11:23 pm

Thinking Differently: Childhood Imagination Reminders

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My background and interest in writing started out due to my wild imagination. I used to love writing short, fictional stories about super heroes, alien races, and immortals. I believe that this imagination, while maybe not as strong today, helped my writing, and solidified me as a decent blogger early on in my career.

When I am in a slump with my writing, I take some time to think back to when I was younger and imagine the things I used to imagine. When on car rides, I used to pretend there was a superhero like ninja running along side of the car, using trees, telephone polls and vehicles on the road to keep up with the car that I was in. I used to imagine that a Star Trek shuttle crash landed in my back yard after traveling back in time, and who, of my friends, I would pick up to create my small crew and what I would do with such advanced technology.

Holding on to these fantasies help me keep my imagination alive, and see things differently than others around me. It also helps me step out from the current situation, and any emotional bias I might have and look at things rationally, as though I would be unaffected by any conclusion I came up with.

I suggest that everyone trying to build a career in blogging take time to think back to when you were younger, your dreams, passions, and fantasies and hold on to them, as I have found getting older gives very little time for such creativity.

Your writing will be better for it.

Originally posted on September 13, 2008 @ 6:40 pm

Creating a Post: Mindmapping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally posted on April 19, 2008 @ 10:22 pm

Do You Read More Than You Write?

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

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

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

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

Originally posted on March 18, 2008 @ 12:33 pm

Dealing With Idea Theft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally posted on January 16, 2008 @ 7:01 pm