How to be popular : Nature Physics. A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25 commandments for journalists | Tim Radford | Science. A Comprehensive Post on SEO. 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Today, too many websites are still inaccessible. In our new book Inclusive Design Patterns, we explore how to craft flexible front-end design patterns and make future-proof and accessible interfaces without extra effort. Hardcover, 312 pages. Get the book now! Effective writing skills are to a writer what petrol is to a car. Of course, effective writing requires a good command of the language in which you write or want to write.
Further Reading on SmashingMag: Link We collected over 50 useful and practical tools and resources that will help you to improve your writing skills. 1. Use English Punctuation Correctly6 A quick and useful crash course in English punctuation. HyperGrammar7 An extensive electronic grammar course at the University of Ottawa’s Writing Centre.
Grammar Girl8 Mignon Fogarty’s quick and dirty tips for better writing. English Style Guide – Economist16 This guide is based on the style book which is given to all journalists at The Economist. 2. Dr. 3. 4. 5. 6. 3 Types of Essays Are Models for Professional Writing Forms. By Mark Nichol The three types of essay most commonly assigned in school — the narrative essay, the persuasive essay, and the expository essay — conveniently correspond to those writing forms most frequently published online and in print. Your experience with these prose forms is ideal preparation for writing for publication. 1. The Narrative Essay This form, employed when reporting about an event or an incident, describing an experience, or telling a story, is the basic mode in journalistic writing.
Practice in relating what happened when you witnessed an occurrence, or writing about what you were told by someone who witnessed it, is good training for becoming a newspaper reporter. Meanwhile, effective storytelling is an essential skill for feature writing, which — as opposed to reporting, which is event driven — focuses on a person, a place, or a thing, such as a company or an organization. 2. In this type of essay, the writer attempts to convince readers to agree with an opinion. 3. 25 Words and Their Prepositional Pals. By Mark Nichol You probably know a preposition — a word that shows a relationship between two words or phrases by demonstrating place, time, or another quality — when you see it, but that’s grammar.
What about usage? Which prepositions go with a given verb or adjective, and when? Some choices are no-brainers, but others can present a challenge. Here’s a guide to various words that require writers to choose from more than one preposition depending on meaning and sentence construction: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. The correct preposition to use with the following words depends on whether the object is a person or a thing: 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 50+ Words That Describe Animals (Including Humans) By Mark Nichol As much as many humans have tried to deny, or have conveniently ignored, that Homo sapiens is just another species of fauna, writers readily use animals or their (sometimes supposed) characteristics to describe people. Words like catty, dogged, foxy, and slothful all attest to the vivid imagery that easily arises when we compare people to various other species. In addition, we speak and write of somebody eating like a bird (to refer to light gustatory habits, though many birds seem downright voracious if you watch them dining), drinking like a fish, or behaving like a bull in a china shop.
Some idioms, however, contradict each other, such as “Work like a dog” and “(living) a dog’s life.” Simple adjectives such as those in the first paragraph are more useful for narrative descriptions of people than the idiomatic phrases just above, but Latinate terms for animals can be even more helpful in describing people. 20 Tips for Freelance Writers. By Mark Nichol Whether you’re moonlighting as a writer or it’s your sole source of income, you must take it seriously in all aspects, from workplace organization to work habits to professional development to marketing to client relations. Here’s some advice about succeeding as a professional writer: 1. Establish a professional work environment. Even if you don’t have a dedicated home office, set up your workspace to maximize your comfort and productivity, with equipment, supplies, and reference works well organized and handy. Impress on family and friends the importance of respecting your space and your time. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
A Novel IS Fiction. By Maeve Maddox I’ve noticed that some people talk about “fiction novels.” A novel IS fiction. One can talk about writing a novel OR about writing fiction. To combine the two is to wear a belt with suspenders. (Another example of reluctance to let the word do the work.) In writing terms, fiction is any non-factual narrative composition. It may be short or long. It may contain historical or scientific facts, and it may describe characters named for historical personages, but the conversations and treatment of events are understood to have been made up by the author. Fiction may be written in various lengths. A short story is a fictional narrative of no longer than 20,000 words and no shorter than 1,000.
A novelette is a fictional narrative of from 7,500 to 17,500 words in length. A novella is a fictional narrative between 17,500 and 40,000 words. A recent fad called “flash fiction” concerns itself with the writing of extremely short narratives. For some authors 100,000 words are not enough: 50 Problem Words and Phrases.
Publishing. Social Networking for Writers : Freelance Writing Jobs | A Freelance Writing Community and Freelance Writing Jobs Resource. 125 Tips for Building an Irresistible Brand. LaTeX - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks. This is a guide to the LaTeX markup language. It is intended to form a useful resource for everybody from new users who wish to learn, to old hands who need a quick reference. TeX and LaTeX TeX is a computer program for typesetting documents, created by Donald Knuth. It takes a suitably prepared computer file and converts it to a form which may be printed on many kinds of printers, including dot-matrix printers, laser printers and high-resolution typesetting machines. LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX that aims at reducing the user's task to the sole role of writing the content, LaTeX taking care of all the formatting process.
The book is organized in different parts. Getting Started will provide you with the very first steps to print your first document: general concepts (very important!) Contents[edit] If you have questions related to LaTeX, ask at the Q&A. Edit the TOC or the stages Other wikibooks[edit] LaTeX Editor—Links to TeX and LaTeX. Textbooks There are several good textbooks on TeX/LaTeX.
Here we recommend only a few of them. Knuth D. E., The TeXbook, Addison–Wesley Professional; Spiral edition (January 1, 1984), ISBN: 0-201-13448-9. This is the main book for all TeX users. The author introduces TeX here. Online TeX/LaTeX books and papers Textbooks are very good references. Oetiker T., The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. TeX/LaTeX Web sites. Texmaker (free cross-platform latex editor) Getting to Grips with LaTeX - LaTeX Tutorials by Andrew Roberts @ School of Computing, University of Leeds. Here are some tutorials I have written for getting up to speed with this excellent document processing system. Funnily enough I wouldn't consider myself an expert, per se, but I'm learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I started to learn LaTeX, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experience plays to your advantage because I cover sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning LaTeX which are probably typical for most beginners.
Benefits LaTeX pre-dates modern graphical word processors, if not modern graphical operating systems! For a more detailed account, see my article regarding the numerous advantages. Tutorials.