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Monthly Archives: December 2009

Simplify Your Storytelling

Tweet I’ve got a couple really simple rules for most of the new writers that I work with: tell your story from start to finish, and tell it from the narrator’s point of view. That sounds obvious, right? Well you’d be amazed how much my writers hate to hear it. My dad wrote his first […]

Building with Words

Tweet My two-year-old daughter got a set of building blocks for Christmas, and that got me thinking about how to make you a better writer. No, really. One of her favorite games for a long time now has been “stack and smash.” She started doing it with empty thread spools, putting two or three together […]

Weekly Writing Exercises

Our first writing exercises focus on the Christmas holidays! Head over to the new forums to write a fake complaint letter to Santa Claus, or practice with point of view by writing a blog post about Christmas from someone else’s perspective.

Tricks Writers Know (or “Whom Cares about this Stuff?”)

Tweet I’ve been writing for a week now, and I haven’t given you one word of practical advice, have I? Oh, sure, there’s promises aplenty, and I do need to spend some time negotiating a connection before I can start transferring knowledge, but when it comes right down to it, you’re here to learn how […]

Practicing Humanity (or The Storytelling Process)

Your job as a person is to examine and understand the world around you, to empathize with new people in a way that lets you see them as real people (not just extras in your life story), and to comprehend the short- and long-term ramifications of events both in and out of your control. Your job as a person (no matter who you are, or what you do) is to be an observer, a communicator, and a creator, and every moment you spend writing you’re working on those things. Usually you’re working on all of them on every page.

Filling in the Blanks

Tweet Between my About page, my introductory article, and just the name of the website, I’ve already made a lot of big promises. Turning Technical Writing into a simple, stress-free task is no small feat, but we’re going to get started right now. While reading that introductory material, you may have noticed that I referred […]

What’s in a Name?

Tweet I have just made the startling discovery that I can turn you into a better writer. As you may have seen in my About page, I’ve recently become a Technical Writing professor. There’s an old saying some of you are probably already thinking about that goes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” […]