50 Tools that can Increase your Writing Skills - by Dumb Little Man

The Manager's Handbook: 80+ Open Courseware Collections to Help You Be a Better Leader Online - Thirty Tools for Writers [Author’s note: Of the many things I’ve written for the Poynter website, none has been as popular as my "Twenty Tools for Writers." This list has been quoted, cited, praised, debated, and repurposed by writers, editors, teachers, and other professionals who care about the craft. That folks find these tools useful gives me courage. As you can see, I’m very impressed with myself. At times it helps to think of writing as carpentry. Below is a list of 30 writing and revising tools. Sentences and Paragraphs 1. 2. 3. 4. Language 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Effects 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. Structure 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. The Writing Life 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. This list contains tools, not rules. Tags: Writing tips and techniques

Fifteen Writing Exercises Writing exercises are a great way to increase your writing skills and generate new ideas. They give you perspective and help you break free from old patterns and crutches. To grow as a writer, you need to sometimes write without the expectation of publication or worry about who will read your work. Pick ten people you know and write a one-sentence description for each of them.

Plot - Element of Fiction by: Roberto Montenegro Any Discussion of plot must begin with the drawing of crucial distinction between plot and narrative. E. M. This is not to say, however, that the writer always explains the connection of events to lives. Narrative is what it told; plot is how the material is shaped to affect the reader. Changing the natural sequence of events is only one of the writer’s plot options. The writer may also choose to tell several stories at once, making use of parallel plots or subplots. The short story, by and large, tends to move toward what Edgar Allan Poe called “the single effect,” a culmination that pulls together a resolves the tensions created by the characters and their circumstances. The classic pattern, from which our fundamental descriptive terms are derived, is linear, with beginning, middle, and end coming in natural sequence. Reference: Birkerts, Sven P.

Best Web-Based Conferencing Tool: WebEx @oneshot719: Webex is 'free' you can continue to make test accounts with fake / random emails. So judging by this poll, you can do that. I have experience using WebEX and actually using it to get major conferences together between 15-30 people all watching web presentations. It's pretty intuitive, however if you have a LARGE powerpoint file, or a movie / video you want to share, YOU DO WANT TO LOG IN EARLY AND UPLOAD IT. The powerpoint training video we used took 45 minutes to upload before we could 'share' it with everyone by the time they were scheduled to join the meeting. @PixelProphet: ok so if i own my domain i can make accounts for webex such as: webextrial1@lucaspc.com webextrial2@lucaspc.com and so on @oneshot719: You can even use thisone@hotmail.com / thisone2@hotmail.com ect without owning the email address.

25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.” Today, writing well is more important than ever. So what can we do to improve our writing short of hanging ourselves? 1. Don’t just plan to write—write. 2. [The] Resistance knows that the longer we noodle around “getting ready,” the more time and opportunity we’ll have to sabotage ourselves. 3. Find your best time of the day for writing and write. 4. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet. 5. Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. 6. 7. Hone your outline and then cling to it as a lifeline. 8. 9.

50 time-saving Google Docs templates Google Docs templates make life just that much easier by providing the bare skeleton of a specific document, spreadsheet or presentation – all you have to do is fill in the blank bits with your information. There are thousands of user-submitted templates to pick from - calendars, presentation designs, fax covers, invitations and business cards are just some of what's available. With so many templates available it can be a little overwhelming searching for the good ones. So we've done the searching for you - here are 50 of the best Google Docs templates that are time saving, elegant, easy to use or simply plain genius. At home 1. 'Lose inches, tone up and get your best body' promises this template. WORKOUT: Keep your body in top form 2. Weekly spending is probably the most simple and easy to use weekly expense template there is. TRACK EXPENSES: Know exactly how your wallet has ended up empty 3. If you are very conscious about your health, the health tracker should suit your needs perfectly.

Presentation lessons from Citizen Kane Citizen Kane (1941) is considered by most film critics to be among the best American films ever produced. The fact that the film's lead actor, writer, and director — the legendary Orson Welles — was only 25-years old, and it was his first movie, makes the film even that much more remarkable. It's a wonderful film that is fresh even today, but are there lessons in the making of the film that we can apply more broadly to other creative arts including presentations? I believe there are. The film was innovative and used techniques in storytelling and production that were not common for the time. Story Structure. Although the unconventional (for the time) nonlinear narrative approach is a tad confusing at times, Citizen Kane made clear use of the basics of storytelling structure: Exposition (beginning), Conflict (middle), and Resolution (end). The non-linear structure of the narrative. Citizen Kane unfolds in a nonlinear and in a sense circular way. “Create your own visual style...