CopyBlogger has a great post today called: Just Say No to These Three Enemies of Clear and Direct Writing. Although I find the title a bit unwieldy, perhaps violating his rules against both something called metadiscourse and pretentiousness, the points are well taken.
Another way to sum it up might be: Keep it simple! It’s amazing how often simple writing works well.
What’s your favorite writing rule?
Write well and often,

Two newsletters:
Abundant Freelance Writing – a resource for freelance writers including 3x a week job postings.
Writing With Vision – for those who want to get a book written.

RedInked is one of the blogs I wish I were writing. A collaboration of three women who started the blog some 19 posts ago, they not only speak wisely and with wisdom about writing and words, but they have the most amazing links! How else might I have found out about Chocolate and Zucchini or the Urban Dictionary?
Their entry called Blogging War leads to some glimpses I wouldn’t have found any other way.
Another entry that caught my attention was When It’s Life or Death – since I’m writing in the disaster preparedness field, I was familiar with Ready.gov and knew …read more

Sometimes I think the world is divided into two types of folks… those who, like me, love the big picture and those who are good with a ton of small details. It’s the latter that make good copy editors.
I’ve recently been reminded how important detail people are. As I headed up the effort to stage a five day conference, I found I was good at seeing the whole, but hopelessly inadequate for dealing with the details. Fortunately I had a second-in-command who is just the opposite. Together we made a truly dynamite team.
It’s the copy editors of the world that …read more

Don’t you just hate it when you start a major cleaning project and in the middle you realize you won’t get it completed until at least tomorrow, and maybe even the day after tomorrow? I’ve got one of those going, and while I’m glad to see the progress, I hate the mess on the floor that’s a result of a work in progress.
Maybe I ought to look at my mess the way I do when I’m in the middle of a manuscript… unfinished manuscripts are also messy. Somehow the unfinished writing doesn’t bother me as much… maybe because it sits …read more

Welcome to the August 10, 2006 edition of about freelance writing blog carnival. Some darn good information here!

Joe Kissell presents

Matt Inglot presents
There you have it… another great writing carnival by some great bloggers. Submit your blog article to the next edition of
About freelance writing blog carnival
using the submission button thingie at the top of this posting. Next carnival on or about August 24th.

Scott Nesbitt over at Words on a Page has a great quote today.
It reminds me of when I was part of an artist’s community – writers, artists and boat workers lived on boats in a low income housing coop on boats. One of the artists had a show opening I attended and it was the first time I’d actually known the artist involved.
There she stood, right in front of her most recent work, alone and vulnerable to the opinions of everyone who looked at her painting. I became so grateful that I’m a writer and not a painter. While …read more

Probably two years ago, I urged a group I belong to to take on their World Conference in 2006. As fate would have it, about 18 months ago I was made chair of the committee. Since then, until July, we’ve been meeting monthly and doing our business in a fairly leisurely fashion. Starting last month, our meetings increased to weekly and now the Conference is nine days away.
Nine days! Only nine days! As you might suspect, there’s a ton yet to do. In fact, when I think about it, it only makes sense that the work load would increase wildly …read more

“Creative Content Maven for Hire” Meryl K. Evans graces us with an outstanding series of tips in her Rules for Writing for the Web Still Steadfast. It’s a great overview of what makes web, and blog, writing effective.
In fact, her rules for web writing are worth a gander even if you never write on the internet.
She’s also got some links worth chasing.
Thanks so much, Meryl!
Write well and often,

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