Posts tagged Writing
How To Win National Novel Writing Month Using Google Docs
Nov 1st
Tomorrow marks day one of National Novel Writing Month, a 30-day, Web-enhanced festival of writing in which thousands of people force themselves (and encourage each other) to finally write that novel they’ve always had in the back of their brain. The NaNoWriMo website gives participants analytics to track the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, and anyone who finishes is a winner.
We’re longtime fans of NaNoWriMo here at RWW. Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus documented his NaNoWriMo experience back in 2003, at the dawn of our site, and we checked back in after NaNoWriMo 2008 for its 10th anniversary. With the fun starting tomorrow (surprise!), Google Docs has offered some tips about how its free, cloud-based document suite can help us all win at NaNoWriMo.
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Google Docs is just one of many tools we can use to crank out our 50,000. I also highly recommend Scrivener, a desktop application from Literature & Latte that gives writers everything they need to work without distractions and stay organized. Scrivener is also a steadfast supporter of NaNoWriMo.
But the ability to work from anywhere without worry is a huge bonus for Google Docs. Any effort to use the Web to encourage more creative writing is all right by us, so we’re glad to pass along our take on how Google Docs can help us all write a novel this month.
Write While You’re On The Go
If you have a smartphone or tablet, you can write your novel from anywhere by visiting docs.google.com in your mobile browser. Here’s how it works:
Android users also got a handsome update to their native Google Docs app, but iOS users can get their words in using the mobile site. Remember, every word counts, so even if it’s just a sentence that pops into your head at the supermarket, it’s vital to write it down.
Track Your Progress and Manage Versions
Google Docs lists a revision history of your document on the right-hand side. This will help you keep track of the work you’ve done each day, and if you end up regretting some huge rewrite, you can always step back.
But try not to do too much of that; the key to winning NaNoWriMo is to stop editing yourself and just keep moving the cursor to the right (or the left, if your language swings that way).
Make It Visual
No, pictures don’t count towards your 50,000 words, but sometimes you’ve got to illustrate, and Google Docs makes it easy. It added some new features last month, like drag-and-drop images, that make visually sprucing up your novel a snap. Another new feature is format painter, which helps quickly change the style of highlighted text, useful for working on your story’s formatting.
Just Write It.
Of course, the only way to write your novel is to do it, so don’t spend too long tweaking your settings. Keep making the clackity noise on your keyboard, and you’ll get to 50,000 this month. Don’t worry. It’s so worth it.
Learn more about National Novel Writing Month at NaNoWriMo.org, and sign up to start writing your novel! You can also follow @NaNoWriMo on Twitter and commiserate with all the other slogging writers using the hashtag #NaNoWriMo.
Are you writing a novel this month? Share your NaNoWriMo profile in the comments!
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Top 10 Tips to Transition Old-Fashioned Content Into Real Time Web Writing
Oct 24th
As the Internet has become an integral part of every company’s marketing strategy, there’s been a feverish push by companies of all sizes to create more easily discoverable online content. A massive explosion of content has, in part, d…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Guide to SEO for Content Writing Now Available on Kindle platform – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Oct 13th
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Guide to SEO for Content Writing Now Available on Kindle platform
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Alan Bleiweiss, a leading search industry expert, speaker, and blogger, has just released his highly acclaimed Site Owners Guide To SEO for Content Writing onto the Amazon Kindle platform. The most popular resource search professionals turn to in … |
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Guide to SEO for Content Writing Now Available on Kindle platform – PR Web (press release)
Oct 13th
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Guide to SEO for Content Writing Now Available on Kindle platform
PR Web (press release) Alan Bleiweiss, a leading search industry expert, speaker, and blogger, has just released his highly acclaimed Site Owners Guide To SEO for Content Writing onto the Amazon Kindle platform. The most popular resource search professionals turn to in … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Writing Lessons From Social Media – Sacramento Bee
Aug 29th
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Writing Lessons From Social Media
Sacramento Bee The Beyond PR blog highlights communications tactics and trends in public relations, investor relations, social media, SEO and content marketing. PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com) is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms that enable … |
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Teaching Creative Writing with Programming
Jul 30th
One of my favorite sessions at OSCon this week was Teaching Creative Writing with Python. Adam Parrish talked about his course Reading and Writing Electronic Text, which he teaches at New York University as part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Although the title emphasizes teaching creative writing through programming, the reverse is also true: the course teaches programming through experimental writing.
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So how exactly is Python programming useful in creative writing? Parrish’s course doesn’t deal with artificial intelligence, or attempts at creating narratives or creating interactive hypertext or anything like that. It covers, for lack of a better term, procedural poetry. Typically, a student takes a starting set of text, writes a Python program to modify that text and then interprets the results.
Parrish cited non-electronic procedural poetry experiments as inspirations for the course. For example, he talked about Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a book in which the text has been cut into strips that can be re-arranged to create nearly endless configurations:
Photo by Thomas Guest. More photos of the book on Flickr.
Parrish also mentioned Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets and David Melnick’s PCOET. Parrish didn’t mention them in his talk, but the course website also mentions Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs’ work with the cut-up technique.
Using these works as a springboard, Parrish teaches his students UNIX commands for working with text, Python text processing techniques (such as ranging from basic string manipulation to n-gram analysis) and regular expressions to help them create their own procedural texts. He says he chose Python because it’s easy to use and has a lot of tools for working with text. Using computers students can process more text and do so more quickly than the physical methods used by the experimenters of the past.
Parrish says pacing is one of the most difficult issues faced in the class. Beginner programmers always feel the class moves too quickly, while experienced programmers find that it moves too slow.
Parrish’s focus is clearly in creative writing and helping students explore text in new ways. But it’s a really interesting experiment in helping art or humanities students learn to program (see our interview with Douglas Rushkoff (who is also a teacher at ITP on why everyone should learn to program). A similar model could also be used to inject the humanities into programming and engineering education.
Where to Find More
Many of the lessons can be found here and the code examples are in Github.
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Words You Want Releases Vital Information about How SEO Writing Can Help Grow … – Benzinga
Jul 28th
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Words You Want Releases Vital Information about How SEO Writing Can Help Grow …
Benzinga Words You Want, a leading national provider of professional SEO writing, has today released essential information and help for those struggling to build a profitable online business. Words You Want, one of the nation's foremost providers of SEO writing … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
6 Excellent Tools For Writing Without Distractions
Jun 29th
Just as the Web has brought us untold advances in innovation, collaboration and productivity, it has also given us things like this Tumblr blog curating animated GIFs of Tom Hanks portraying various animals, not to mention Farmville, Twitter or the 35 hours of video that are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
With so many digital distractions, it’s a wonder we can get anything done. For those of us for whom being productive means stringing words together, whether we’re bloggers, marketing copy writers or aspiring novelists, the Internet can be a mixed blessing. Fortunately, there are a number of writing applications that attempt to block out the distractions so we can finally focus.
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iA Writer
Platform: Mac, iPad
Cost: $17.99 for Mac; $4.99 for iPad.
Try It: http://www.iawriter.com/
iA Writer is a popular writing application with a design that’s about as minimalist as they come. The interface contains very few options and preferences to tinker with. You can put it into full screen mode or FocusMode, which highlights only the sentence you’re writing and greys out everything. Other than that, the only option is to write.
It’s only available for Mac OS and iPad, and while it isn’t cheap, it comes highly recommended by the likes of Tim O’Reilly and Web designer extraordinaire Jason Santa Maria.
It comes with solid support for Markdown syntax so you can format your test without fussing around with the mouse.
OmmWriter
Platform: Mac, PC, iPad
Cost: Free betas for Mac & PC (or choose your own price for the premium version); $4.99 for iPad.
Try It: http://www.ommwriter.com
The experience of using OmmWriter isn’t just about the distractions it blocks out, but also what it adds. Minimalist background images and subtle, ambient music aim to promote a state of mental relaxation and focus.
As the desktop client recommends when you start it up, OmmWriter is best experienced with headphones. You can choose from three ambient audio tracks or turn the sound off if you’re not in the mood to go all-out Zen.
After a few years of offering a desktop client, OmmWriter more recently put out an iPad version, as have a few other providers. This seems especially appropriate, as the iPad (and tablets more generally) tend to be much more conducive to focusing than desktop computers with their browser tabs, desktop notifications
Clean Writer
Platform: Mac, iPad
Cost: $.99
Try It: http://www.alexbrie.com/archives/259
CleanWriter, as you may be able to guess from its name, is another writing app with a very minimal design. Like iA Writer and OmmWriter, it’s available for both Mac OS and the iPad, but with a smaller price tag.
Some of its noted perks include the option to write on a black background and the ability to sync files with Dropbox.
Ulysses
Platform: Mac (via Mac App Store or Web download)
Cost: $29.99
Try It: http://www.the-soulmen.com/ulysses
Rather than a blank page with few to no buttons, Uylsses offers something closer to a full-fledged word processing app for Mac owners with some project management features built in.
It may have more buttons and features than many of these other writing apps, but Uylsses is still relatively stripped-down and maintains a focus on distraction-free, semantic text editing. It’s geared more toward professionals, as the price tag would suggest.
Ulysses supports exporting documents in a variety of standard formats, including DOC, RTF and PDF.
QuietWrite
Platform: Any (Web app)
Cost: Free
Try It: http://www.quietwrite.com
For those who would prefer a free, platform agnostic approach to focused writing, QuietWrite is a Web app that lets you get started right this minute, from your Web browser. It has a few buttons and controls across the top, but they only appear when the mouse or trackpad is in use. If you’re only typing, the buttons disappear. Nice touch.
As a free product, it’s pretty light on features, but for users who just need to get some simple writing done without bells and whistles, it more than does the trick. Once you start writing, QuietWrite will begin periodically auto-saving your drafts. When you’re done, you have the option to export the draft directly to WordPress.
You don’t need to sign up for an account to get started, but if you want to manage and publish your drafts, you’ll have to take a few seconds and set up an account, which, as we may have mentioned, is free.
Byword
Platform: Mac
Cost: $9.99
Try It: http://bywordapp.com
ByWord is a writing app that’s reminiscent of iA Writer, but is available for a few bucks less and is only available on Mac OS. It supports standard text editing features and Markdown syntax, as well as the more its more complex superset called MultiMarkdown.
A Few Other Options
These are far from the only distraction-free writing apps available, but this represents some of the best. Some other options worth checking out would be WriteMonkey (free, for Windows), Q10 (free, for Windows) and PenZen (a free Web app).
Pencil photo courtesy of Flickr user orangeacid
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The Copy House Introduces Article Writing Services for Effective SEO – SBWire (press release)
Jun 26th
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The Copy House Introduces Article Writing Services for Effective SEO
SBWire (press release) New Delhi, India — (SBWIRE) –06/26/2011 — The Copy House, one of India's leading content writing agencies has introduced article writing services for effective SEO. These services are aimed at helping SEO companies and website owners achieve their … |
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The Copy House introduces article writing services for effective SEO – openPR (press release)
Jun 24th
 openPR (press release) |
The Copy House introduces article writing services for effective SEO
openPR (press release) (openPR) – The Copy House, one of India's leading content writing agencies has introduced article writing services for effective SEO. These services are aimed at helping SEO companies and website owners achieve their SEO goals. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
