In our data-conscious society, we do hella evaluation. Maybe it’s time for some inspiration instead?
(Hey, we kept a straight face through those two sentences. Awesome, huh? Oh, wait…)
by Scott Barry Kaufman, Pd.D.We live in a culture saturated with evaluation.
He made up his own words! Broke all the #@!ing rules! Of course other writers at the time thought he was crap. Mucho food for thought here, especially if you consider yourself a language purist:
13 Words Invented by ShakespeareLike Precalculus and Newton’s laws, Shakespeare’s plays are among the most groaned-about high school topics, begetting the complaint: “When will I ever need to know about this in real life?” Turns out, pretty often. Shakespeare can be credited for the invention of thousands of words that are now an everyday part of the English language (including, but not limited to, “eyeball,” “fashionable,” and “manager.”)
In addition to his being a particularly clever wordsmith, Shakespeare’s word invention can be credited to the fact that the English language as a whole was in a major state of flux during the time that he was writing. Colonization and wars meant that English speakers were borrowing more and more words from other languages.
Time now for a brilliant analysis of What’s Ailing You. (Us? Them?) Several of us here at TVWriter™ found this to be wonderfully helpful. For reals.
by Belle Beth CooperWhen you’re facing a blank page with no idea what to write, it’s hard to imagine how you’ll ever get to the other side of a finished piece. I’ve gone through this a few times, so I thought it might be helpful to share the methods that have worked for me.
1. Be honest & work your struggles into your content
This is actually the method that inspired this post. I was working on a post about Google Analytics recently and I was struggling to get started. After a few false starts, I finally decided to just write my concerns into the post. It turned out well, and made me think that sharing this method, and others I use, could be helpful to others.
The title is right on. We believe that this article does indeed tell us how to keep a resolution to write. But…is writing all by itself enough? Or should we be working at writing with an added adverb like “well,” or “effectively?” Oh, wait, that’s the second step, we get it. The first step, which we definitely agree with, is to just plain: WRITE!!!
by Sonia SimoneIt’s that time of year again. Time for resolutions, and for all of the skeptics and killjoys who say that resolutions never work.
They certainly can work, but you need to approach them the right way.
No, that question isn’t a set-up in search of a punchline. It’s a very common writers’ problem. Here’s how Nathan Bransford looks at it:
by Nathan BransfordI’m on record saying Writer’s Block doesn’t exist. There’s really no writing problem that can’t be solved by staring at a blinking cursor until you think of something.
But man do I get tired sometimes. This happened to me in the past month. I worked like crazy to get my guide to writing a novel finished and published and promoted just as I was starting a new job while still maintaining my commitment to make sure I’m getting enough time away from the computer and spending time with friends in person. It was a lot.