Archive for February, 2008
Don’t worry about competition
Deb Ng has an interesting post that muses about whether or not you should worry about competition while applying for freelance writing jobs. I don’t think you should worry.
Changing faces
You may or may not have noticed, but the appearance of this blog has been changing a bit over the last little while. That’s because I can’t find a WordPress theme that I really, really like. I’m getting close, so please bear with me in the meantime.
Interview with John Gruber
John Gruber — writer, blogger, and creator of Markdown — had more than a few interesting things to say in a long, wide-ranging, but never dull interview titled “John Gruber: A Mix of the Technical, the Artful, the Thoughtful, and the Absurd“.
In the interview, Gruber discusses interviewing, how he writes, and his typical writing day. [...]
Q10: another distraction-free editor
As I wrote in a previous entry, I often use JDarkRoom to write articles and the like. The full-screen editing feature lets me write without distractions. I’ve also started playing with a similar editor called PyRoom, which although is bare bones at the moment shows quite a bit of promise.
Gordon McLean has written about another [...]
Keeping it short
Prefer concise to wordy? Having trouble convincing other people of the importance of keeping things short? Then read this blog post, which makes a good case for concise communication.
Writing on a mobile device
Most people view smartphones as devices for both making calls and surfing the Web. But they can be used to write, too. in Japan, novels are written for mobile phones, and more than one budding novelist has written using a phone.
While that trend hasn’t quite reached North America just yet, people do write using their [...]
An intersection between music and writing
This from guitarist Robert Fripp:
The first necessary foundation of craft: reliability. The second: repeatability – beginners’ luck is fine for beginners. The third: response-ability - our capacity to respond to challenges & opportunities.
How do we establish a craft discipline? Practising. What is the first necessity of practising? Regularity.
A regular practice addresses:
knowing the instrument; knowing the vocabulary; knowing the [...]
Lessons learned from an autistic child
My daughter Thais is autistic. Over the years, as we’ve worked with her to try to help her overcome her condition, my wife and have have experienced as many highs as we have lows. But in that time, Thais has taught me a lot. And what I’ve learned can be applied to my freelance writing [...]
Q&A about careers in technical writing
Interested in a career in technical writing? Or are you wondering what the job entails? Then head over to Tom Johnson’s blog where he answers 13 questions about technical writing jobs.
Tom brings some interesting insights into his answers. As an English major, he discovered (as many of us do) that making a living as a [...]
Going analog
One of the keys to writing is to approach the task with a clear mind. Barring that, a clear understanding of the flow of the document that you are writing or intend to write. Sometimes, though, you can’t get that by sitting in front of a computer. You might be able to write, but what [...]