Tag Archives: writing

Three Shades of English

scrabble words

There are only three types of sentences in written English.

  1. This is the first sort.
  2. This is the second sort, which has a number of clauses, normally separated by commas.
  3. This is the third sort that is separated by conjunctions and just runs on and on until it stops.

Good writing isn’t hard. Create variety in your prose by using a mixture of all three types of sentences so that the readers don’t get bored with your style. It’s simple, it’s attractive, and it works.

The previous paragraph is composed of these sentence types. See what we mean?

Photo by Amanda Jones

Hey, give me back my day

Commenting on web forums can be a lot of fun, and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that it can divert your creativity away from more productive work.

A useful rule for me: Participate only when you have deep knowledge of a subject, so that the airing of your authority can help you and others.

Social media such as Facebook can be just as addictive and time-wasting, and this is well-documented. Still, their purpose is often personal, and we all need diversions from the serious stuff of being in business.

Professional forums undoubtedly have a social aspect too, so the delineation isn’t clear-cut.

TOP COMMENTER

Forums encourage activity by rating contributors on the number of posts, upvotes or karma points. You can become a Gold account holder, Pro level, VIP, Established Member, and so on. Who doesn’t want to be a prestigious and recognised contributor?

On one forum that I read, though don’t comment on, the top person has posted 77,000 times since he joined in 2002. He no doubt believes that he “owns” the forum, as he’s willing to slap down contributors whom he feels are not up to the mark.

I’ve happily spent a whole morning commenting on sites that have left me hot as a scramjet by lunchtime, though completely uninterested in doing any other meaningful work for the rest of the day.

EMPTINESS

The buzz is wonderful but is also addictive. It’s hard to resist doing the same thing the next day and the next.

The result? An empty sense of time and creativity wasted.

For the purposes of productivity, it’s good to set a strict rule for yourself on the conditions in which you may or may not post – in the same way that a gambler needs limits on when she or he can continue.

Otherwise you end up asking what happened to your day.

Photo by Andy T

 

Tried and tested devices

Black Lives Matter. Indeed they do, and the snappiness of the slogan is an important factor in burning the saying into people’s minds.

It has a nice rhyme, plus the alliteration provided by the repeated Ls.

How about these?

  • Twenty-First Century Fox
  • Apple Mac
  • Starbucks
  • Boris Johnson
  • YouTube, TikTok, Google, Samsung
  • Gone With The Wind (oldie but a goodie)
  • Tyranny of distance
  • Battle with cancer

If you want your name, slogan or saying to be remembered, don’t be bashful about using these devices. Tried and Tested.

At some stage, you have to clean engines

Do what you love, we’re told, and it won’t even feel like work. Sounds good, yet the truth is that you’re not going to embrace everything about a job.

A friend recently announced that she was giving up writing fiction, because she didn’t enjoy the process enough. Other people, she said, loved creating novels. She realized that she didn’t.

Hold on, what didn’t she like?

LEARNED COMPETENCE

Fiction writing has a number of components, including plotting, crafting sentences, writing dialogue, and editing the raw drafts. A bunch of skills are required.

Some people are natural story tellers. They get carried along by the power of their tale and can hammer out a first draft in weeks, though the prose may be unexceptional in quality.

Other folk love crafting sentences and paragraphs, while having trouble shaping the whole thing into a coherent narrative.

The tasks you don’t like doing can be a grind, but they’re part of the skill-set. You learn to be competent at those aspects that don’t come naturally or easily.

This is why any profession or trade is a love-hate affair. You can delegate or contract out stuff you really don’t want to do, but some of it can’t be avoided. It’s difficult to be a mechanic who refuses to clean engines, or a general practitioner who won’t talk to patients.

Too bad about my writer friend. You can’t love it all.

Can’t face another day

Write every day, we are told. It’s intended as good advice, whether we’re creating fiction, a blog, or other forms of non-fiction.

The idea is that a regular habit will maintain the flow of thought and get the job completed faster and better than a spasmodic effort.

Yet if we undertake other focused disciplines on a daily basis, we run the risk of overtraining. Anybody who has worked out hard knows the bad feeling of not being able to face another session at the gym because neither the body nor the mind is ready for it.

What’s so different about writing?

In defiance of commonsense, people are expected to be able to push beyond a funk, favor perspiration over inspiration, force themselves through the wall.

This makes little sense. The mind can become exhausted, no less than the body.

DAILY CHURN

By all means look at your writing every morning, assess it, think about where it’s come from and where it’s going. But don’t feel you must churn out another 500 or thousand words, just because today is another day.

Nothing is as good as coming back fresh from a period of rest.

When your writing won’t work

Stuck with your content writing? If an article won’t flow, chances are that you’re suffering from a common problem, which is that you don’t have a clear picture in your head of whom you’re writing for.

The result is that you can’t think what to say or how to say it.

Stop and consider. Work out who your audience is and try to envisage a typical member of that audience. Start writing again.

This trick is usually effective. Vague sentences are replaced by precise, targeted phrases and everything seems to flow.

You can’t write for everybody. Try instead to write for somebody. The likely outcome is that it will be read with pleasure by many.