Write or Die by Dr Wicked | Putting the 'Prod' in Productivity About | Designing Change I’m a design thinker who believes we can change ourselves, our organizations, our communities, our governments, and the world by design. I work at OpenText as Director of Customer Experience. My current focus is on defining what it means to deliver holistic, intelligent experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. Experiences that change minds and spark action. I’ve been immersed in the world of enterprise software for over 20 years. I grew up on the Canadian prairies, studying political science and communications at the University of Alberta, graduating with B.A. in Canadian Studies in 1986. I currently live in Kingston, Ontario, although I’m still a westerner at heart. “My job was to be loyally subversive.”
WRITING TOOLS | WRITERS HELPING WRITERS Character Pyramid Tool (PDF) Visualize your character’s FLAWS & associated behaviors (for a deeper understanding of this tool, please reference The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws) Character Target Tool (PDF) Organize and group your character’s POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES by category: moral, achievement, interactive or identity (for a greater understanding of this tool, please reference The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes) Character Profile Questionnaire (PDF) Not your average character questionnaire! Reverse Backstory Tool (PDF) Work backwards to find your character’s wound, needs & lie (for a deeper understanding of this tool, please reference The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws) Weak Verb Converter Tool (PDF) Transform all those generic, boring verbs into power verbs Scene Revision/Critique Tool Level 1 & Level 2 (PDF) A ‘light’ and ‘in-depth’ revision checklist for creating compelling characters and scenes
Spacejock Software 15 free tools for better online storytelling | News Designs Whoever said “practice makes perfect” was a liar. Human beings have been practicing storytelling for over 35,000 years (that we know of), and there is still plenty of room for improvement. For all intents and purposes, storytelling is the art of making people interested in what you have to say. If you can get them to remember what you’ve said … bonus points. Early storytellers quickly learned that a tale could be far more riveting (and as result, more enduring) if it captured one’s imagination and invoked thought. Every time the skies open up and a new technology arrives on the scene, we take a stab at reinventing one of the oldest traditions known to man. Just like the early storytellers of our past, we have stumbled onto a new way of capturing imagination and invoking thought. The invention of the internet, and the tidal flow of information that followed, has equipped us with a way to tell stories that Neanderthals would have drooled over. Here’s my collection so far:
Free Action Verb list for Writers Early in my writing career, I discovered that using action verbs adds to the color and passion of nearly any type of writing (from novels to screenplays to resumes). For some unknown reason, new writers almost reflexisively tend toward verbs of being. These verbs are inert and slow down description. Johnny is in bed. That tells the reader the basics of Johnny's situation, but Johnny is essentially static. Johnny collapses into the bed. Isn't the second sentence much more compelling? Here I have posted the my list as a Microsoft Word document and Adobe Acrobat PDF file. Action Verb List in Microsoft Word format (.doc, 76K) Action Verb List in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (.pdf, 46K) PS: I collected all of this information and more in a handy poster for easy reference.
WriteWords - Writing Community - jobs, directory, forums, articles for writers - StumbleUpon Automated argument assistance As part of the ITeR project I have been working in, I have developed several experimental systems for automated argument-assistance. Argument-assistance systems are aids to draft and generate arguments, e.g., by administering and supervising the argument process, keeping track of the issues that are raised and the assumptions that are made, keeping track of the reasons adduced, the conclusions drawn, and the counterarguments that have been adduced, evaluating the justification status of the statements made, and checking whether the users of the system obey the pertaining rules of argument. Argument-assistance systems should be distinguished from the more common automated reasoning systems. The latter automatically perform reasoning on the basis of the information in their 'knowledge base'. In this way, an automated reasoning system can do (often complex) reasoning tasks for the user. Currently the following experimental systems can be downloaded: Argue!
Onomatopoeia Dictionary - Written Sound Welcome - Ommwriter 5 Creative Uses for Crowdsourcing When Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article his examples were mainly “labor markets for specialized talents,” like iStockphoto, iFilm, and InnoCentive. But the business model of outsourcing to the crowd has grown (as has Howe’s article — he published a book on the topic in 2008). As open-source software developers learned long ago, asking a pool of people to create something can be faster, cheaper, and more accurate than putting a project in the hands of individuals. 1. Traffic jams are one place where you can count on people having unexpected free time. Even when out of a jam, just having the app open adds map and traffic information. The automated system isn’t perfect, but drivers can flag errors, like missing roads, for people to correct online. Waze also provides an opportunity for individuals to earn online fame. 2. Many professionals have a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. 3. 4. 5. More social media resources from Mashable:
Misktakes In Writing Here's the slightly revised and updated text of an article I wrote a while back. It seems to have done a lot of folks a lot of good as they have set out to learn the craft of writing fiction. Note: Except for the links to my Home page and the list of my books, all of the links and jumps in this article stay inside the document. You can save it to disk, load it to your Web reader off-line, and jump from item to item without accidently popping off into some other file in Katmandu. by Roger MacBride Allen You can read straight through or jump to: Roger MacBride Allen's Home Page A list of Roger MacBride Allen's books Introduction Errors of Style: Passive Voice Inappropriate Use of Summary Narration Point of View errors Poor Choice of Tense and Person Time Control Errors Unnamed Characters Errors of Substance: The Weird Opener & The Unintergrated Opener Retread of the Same Old Same Old Confusing the Author's Motives with the Character's Failure to Deal with Consequences Development Errors Bad Planning 1. 2.