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"Business Writing Checklist"
You're ready to do it. You've accepted an assignment from your boss, agreed to put together a sales presentation, or were asked to write a report about last week's meeting results. Where do you begin? Before you venture off into the land of writing...
Creative Writing Tips - Have You Established Your Main Character At The Start?
In the beginning of your story you have to grab your readers’ interest and sustain it till the end. Our hook is our character. Readers keep on reading to find out more about the character. To see what he’ll do in the story; how he’ll solve his...
Everything I Needed to Know About Article Writing I Learned from My English Teacher
By now you probably understand how important writing for trade publications is to establishing credibility in the home business world.
On to the first hurdle: how do you get past that HUGE writers' block? How do you know what to write about,...
How to Break Into Writing for Newspapers
Besides waking up with a morning coffee, millions of us wake every day to blaring newspaper headlines about police gunning down a suspect, or a fire that leaves a family of four homeless, or a city council that wants to make it illegal to dump...
Segmenting Your Target Audience Through Your Copywriting
by Karon Thackston © 2004 http://www.copywritingcourse.com Ask any copywriter what the first commandment of copywriting is and they’ll quickly tell you “Know Thy Target Audience.” In order to write effectively you have to know this one group of...
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WRITING YOUR WRITING JOB DESCRIPTION
Have you ever heard about the "motivational" concept of writing your own obituary?
The idea is, you write what you would like your obit to say, by summarizing all those accomplishments that you most want to achieve during the course of your life. Motivation gurus suggest that this enables us to focus on what's most important to us, while discarding those activities that truly don't matter in the long run.
Along similar--but less morbid--lines, I believe that we writers might find it helpful if we took the time to write our own writing job descriptions. If we could lead the writing lives of our dreams, what types of writing would we be doing? Who would our customers and/or readers be? In what niches would we specialize? What would we consider to be our strongest skills, our areas of expertise?
Or let's say that you want to diversify your writing goals. You could develop a job description for each niche. In this way, you could identify the experience and skills you already possess, and which ones you still need to work on.
Here's an example: suppose one of your writing career goals involves writing profile articles--of celebrities, politicians, business leaders, scientists, or just ordinary people who do extraordinary things. What attributes would such a writer need to possess? Excellent interviewing skills, obviously. Research skills would help as
well; you certainly wouldn't want to walk into the interview with absolutely no background knowledge of your interviewee or his/her subject matter. Attention to detail would come in handy, too. What is your interviewee wearing? What can you say about his smile, or her vocal qualities? What does the interviewee's home or office tell us about him?
So your profile writing job description might look like this:
Job Title: Profile Article Writer
Job Description: Interview famous, influential and or interesting people, and write article profiles on them for publication in local and national magazines.
Skills/Experience Needed: Excellent writing skills and attention to detail required. Experience in conducting interviews with people in a wide variety of occupations. Proven online and library research skills. Knowledge of publications with a track record of running article profiles.
Do you see how creating a writing job description for yourself might help direct you towards the kinds of writing assignments that you want to land? If so, spend some time today developing your own.
About the Author
Mary Anne Hahn is editor and publisher of WriteSuccess, the free biweekly ezine of ideas, information and inspiration for people who want to launch and maintain successful writing careers. To subscribe, mailto: writesuccess-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
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Writing.Com: Writers, Writing, Poetry, Creative Writing, Fiction ... |
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owl.english.purdue.edu |
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National Novel Writing Month - National Novel Writing Month |
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www.nanowrimo.org |
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www.poynter.org |
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BBC Get Writing |
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Menu of articles on writing written by professional SF/F writers. |
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IPL Teenspace: A+ Research & Writing |
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Free online English dictionary and reference guide. List of sites writers can use. |
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WritingFix: Home of Interactive Writing Prompts and 6 Trait ... |
Daily and interactive writing prompts. |
www.writingfix.com |
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Advice on Academic Writing |
Includes articles on critical reading, planning, researching, style and editing, grammar and punctuation. |
www.utoronto.ca |
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