An Intro On Writing

Thanks to the soaring popularity of blogging, writing is fast becoming one of the hottest gig in town. Writers are slowly turning to be the new wave of call center agents, without the high salary and lucrative benefits. It is the failsafe job you can get anytime, if your desired primary job isn't available. Like the call center industry, you need a good grasp of the English language to be accepted in a writing position. The difference between the two is that you don't have to be an English major or Communications graduate to be a writer. Additionally, you don't have to learn that ridiculous accent required by many call centers just to prove you speak good English. If you like sitting in front of your computer all day and hate social interactions prefer communicating through the keyboard, then creative writing may be your calling.

Sounds familiar?

Writing Made Easy

Writing entails a fairly direct process. To expand a topic, you simply need to:
1. Research.Usually here, here and here.
2. Write. This usually means rephrase to circumvent copyscape, plagiarism, copyright issues and other legal hullaballoos.
3. Proofread. For spelling, grammar and wordiness. Always look out for those red and green wavy underlines in Open Office and MS Word.
4. Repeat.

Public bathroom walls are now safe, thanks to blogging.

Personal Guidelines To Writing

Writers for Qool Media were given several guidelines to follow. Our Canadian editors also gave us tips every week to lessen their editing chores improve our writing. These are the rules that I never fail to follow with each article I create.

1. Never speak in the first person. I never use "I," "me" and "we." I even avoid quotes that have those words in them. This aims to make the articles more formal. Plus, we don't get any credits for the articles we do anyway. Maybe they should have changed the job description from Junior Writer to Ghost Writer. Hmm...
2. Avoid turning the article into an FAQ. Unless specifically requested, our articles aren't made in a Q&A format. The headings and subheadings of our articles are short phrases or statements, not questions.
3. No hanging statements. We have no need to leave out words or thoughts. This means no ellipses. Personally, I try to make do with commas and avoid using dashes as well.
4. Always check for wordiness. Everything in Kim Blank's list would definitely cure your wordy ways, but those list below are mistakes I am usually guilty of.

• a lot of = many, much
• a majority of = most, much of, many
• after all is said and done = DELETE
• all of these = these
• are/was/were able to = can OR DELETE
• as a matter of fact = in fact OR DELETE
• as a means to = to
• as a whole = DELETE
• at all times = always OR DELETE
• compare and contrast = compare
• considered as = considered
• in order to = to
• in the near future = soon OR DELETE
• in the not too distant future = soon OR DELETE
• in today's society = today
• it is necessary that = must/should
• the majority of = most/many
• whether or not = whether/if OR DELETE
• which is = DELETE (when possible)
• who are/was/were = DELETE

However, I deliberately bypass these rules when I need to use the wordy phrase several times within the article, which brings us to... (oops!)
5. Watch for word density. I learned about this when my editors started complaining about how frequent I use "can" or "will" in some of my articles. They told me to mix it with "could" and "would" but until now, I still don't know how and when to use "can/could" and "will/would". When I checked my articles that used the second person, I noticed that my auxiliary verbs total to 10+, which is too much for articles of up to 2,000 words. Anyway, I applied this to other words too, especially those directly related to the main topic. The next time you write about flowers, try replacing it with synonyms and adjectives like bloom or flora. This way, you optimize your use of word count by rolling a description/predicate and a subject into one.
6. Don't start statements with coordinating conjunctions. I really don't know much about coordinating conjunctions, but starting your sentences with "so," "and," "but," and "or" isn't pretty. Rather than beginning with "and," use "similarly," "additionally," or "likewise" instead. Similarly (see what I did there?), start with "however" or "on the other hand" instead of "but."
7. Don't conclude. We merely rephrase the ideas of others. Unless you are writing something original and your results are based on scientific deductions, you shouldn't conclude either. That means no "hence," "therefore" and "thus."
8. Count words. Nobody wants to read loooooooooooooooooooooong articles. That's my cue to end this post.

Hopefully, these pointers would help your writing as it did mine. Blogging is a completely different animal though, as no writing rule here is carved in stone. Nobody wants to be bound by rules. I know I skipped a few of them myself in this post alone.