Articles in the writing Category
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Here’s a post I wrote on September 11, 2006. It still sums up this day in history for me.
Five years on
Just looking at today’s date immediately sends me back five years. We were living in Virginia and I was working in Washington DC. I’ll never forget standing at the westward window of our office watching the smoke billowing from the Pentagon. That was the moment I came to understand why they call it terrorism. It’s an extremely apt term.
Looking at the pale, worried faces of the women I worked as they …
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Most professional communicators have long since come to depend on dictionary.com as a reference resource for turning out quality copy. Now, just in time for back to school, the online dictionary is available for use on iPhone and Android.
No Internet connection is needed, so users can look up the definition or synonyms for a word anytime, anywhere. Not sure how to use the word in a sentence? Examples are provided. Not sure how to pronounce the word? Audio pronunciation is available. Not sure how to spell the word? Just start …
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After 244 years, the Encyclopedia Britannica has decided to halt the presses and go out of print. Facing the realities and the stiff competition from Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica will now focus primarily on their online services. But even then, it might be too late. Wikipedia has grown to be the number one source for students. In fact, many students will stop research and change topics if it’s not on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia provides a wealth of information with over 26 billion pages of content. Though the quality of Wikipedia has been …
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There’s a free online resource to check out the real defnition of slang words and street terms. It’s contributed to and edited by thousands of people online who add their own meanings to millions of words. With more than 6 million definitions, So Slang claims to be the biggest hub for street definitions.
Some examples:
Bazinga! A catchy phrase to accompany your clever pranks. As popularized by Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory).I just replaced your toothpaste with denture cream. Bazinga!
Jump the shark a term to describe a moment when something that …
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BookRix, an online community connecting more than 150,000 writers, readers and authors has just launched a new collaborative application, SocialBook. It allows writers anywhere in the world to collaborate in building an online e-book from either their Facebook, Twitter or BookRix profiles, simply with connecting their accounts and including a specified #hashtag. It can be saved, stored, shared and even embedded like a YouTube video, with real-time updates and no limit on the number of co-authors.
The BookRix SocialBook gives Facebook, Twitter and BookRix users an easy way to collect posts, …
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I can only wish that someday I might be able to write as well as Stephen Fry. Alas, I don’t hold out much hope. Here’s an excellent video animation based on Stephen’s podcast. I agree with most of what Stephen says here. But still, I can’t forgive too many apostrophe crimes. Thank you @canuckflack for the heads up on this.
Related posts:
An apology
Getting it write
Writing about writing
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You know, not a week goes by that I don’t hear from someone who’s interested in getting a start in PR and is wondering what it’s all about. So I thought it might be helpful to create a seminar that will answer many of the questions I hear time and again.
It occurred to me that we might as well, at the same time, offer some help and pointers for people in business who are not PR specialists but find themselves involved in doing PR for their employer or their own …
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For the last week, inspired by Kyle Flaherty, I’ve endeavored to follow a ‘one app at a time’ policy. That means I have one application open on my desktop any one time. The idea is to try to cut down the noise and be more productive.
So TweekDeck stayed open only when I was using it. If I was writing, only Word remained on my desktop.
So one week later, how is the experiment going?
It was a lot harder to do than I expected. In fact, I found it almost impossible not …
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I was not shocked to read the headline City drops apostrophes from signs.
It just made me sad to read that the city of Birmingham, Britain’s second city, has decided not use the possesive apostrophe on signs in the future. They say this decision will cut costs and avoid confusion.
Why am I sad? Because I love the English language! I love its quirky rules and exceptions to those rules. I love that everything is not spelled phonetically. I love that there are several meanings to some words, and several spellings …
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Jeff Pulver is encouraging us to take part in Blogday 2008 and I figure why not? It’s a great way for us all to check out different blogs and maybe learn a thing or two. So here are my five blogs (non-PR) to celebrate BlogDay.
1. Special Little People provides aromatherapy products for children. Blogger Janine Wood shares how she uses scents in her own life as a mother. She has a nice writing style and reveals quite a bit about herself and her life.
2. I love reading Dan Santow’s blog …
