Words on a page

It doesn’t matter what your high school English teacher said. It doesn’t matter what your university composition instructor said. And it definitely doesn’t matter what Microsoft Word’s grammar checker tells you.

When writing, there are times when you need to break the rules.

Shocking. Perhaps even sacrilegious. But why do it? There are a number of reasons. I tend to break the rules for three reasons:

1. Your writing will sound (or at least seem) more conversational.
2. A piece of writing that breaks the rules, and does the job properly, is often more memorable and has a bit more impact than a properly-formed sentence.
3. Shock value. if someone is expecting a so-called proper constructions and don’t get them, they’ll either be surprised, or (I hope) intrigued enough to keep reading.

Here are some of my thoughts about this.

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Information. It’s the stock and trade of the professional writer. Notes. Facts. Quotes. Sundry bits and pieces that help us when it comes time to write.

One problem that writers face is keeping all the information that we collect in one easy-to-access location. That can be hard because we’re often never in one place at all times. Take me, for example. My main computer is the laptop on my desk at home. When I’m running around, I often carry a netbook. Often, but not always. Sometimes I only have my BlackBerry with me. Sometimes not even that.

So, how can you easily organize that information? Read on for a few suggestions.

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That’s something I’m not always keen on. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against sharing. It’s just that things can go badly.

I prefer to use a wiki or Google Docs to collaborate. But not everyone I work with thinks like me, or is comfortable with the range of tools that I’m comfortable with.

And to be honest, email doesn’t really work. Too many bad things can happen to attachments:

• They can get stripped from messages
• They can get corrupted
• It’s easy to get confused about the current version of a file if multiple revisions are floating around

Whenever possible, I try to get editors and clients to work with an online file sharing service. These services are cheap, efficient, and easy to use.

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