What makes a great writer

What makes a good writer become a great writer? A writer can communicate all sorts of Intricacies with his order of words. Their special way with words can prove most powerful. Painting visuals with words is a necessary writing skill. Great article writing must have substance to influence others. Its okay to be simple when writing. The more a writer uses complicated words the more likely I won’t continue reading. Tell readers what worked for you when you needed extra help. You can make the most out of writing. Your opinion matters so don’t hesitate to express it in ink. Your search for what is not obvious. Writing is learning but finding real value in the work can take time.

The technical side of writing

Not all writers write in song or rhythm. Never underestimate the power of a great technical writer. If you can’t understand the technical language try reading a book on it. Wikipedia taught me that technical writing equals formal writing used in many different fields.”(Wikipedia) Technical writing explains technical ideas to technical and nontechnical users. Technical writers can teach people how to sew or ride a bike. Help people understand the impossible with technical writing. Try to get your point across with clear statements. A good sentence will contain a finalized thought. Writing requires organization and fact finding skills to find the path you desire.

The challenges of writing

Now that we have touched on creative writing, and technical writing. Article writing works best when teamed up with an editor and publisher. The editors edit the material while the publisher organizes a schedule for the team. The greatest achievement for a writer is the ability to captivate through good content. You can find inform. See what others are doing wearing acting or hiding without saying a word then write what you learned. Strong researchers get noticed by organizations such as the Bureau of labor and statistics. Using sources and citations is a very professional and ethical practice.

Affiliate article writing for profit

Lastly I would like to discuss affiliate article writing. Affiliate writing is a way for businesses to advertise. Affiliate marketing allows a person to have flexibility and great pay in their lives. Affiliate writers make your idea stylish. You can gain much wealth by helping corporations market their services. Article Writing is for anyone who wants to communicate something to the world. Communication enables people to see things through unfamiliar eyes. Learning the rules first will give you the advantage in the industry of communication.

But you can do your article marketing in a different way and that’s what I want to talk about in this article.

The “Interest Focus” method, the second method, does not care which keywords are in fashion at the time of writing. You close your eyes and think about what excites you the most in life and then you write about THAT. You refuse the “keyword of the moment” to drive your campaign and determine your content.

You channel all your enthusiasm and good vibrations into your articles. When you do that you’ll create an exceptional “reader experience” since most Internet articles feel dry and formulaic.”

This method also does have a major drawback – if your interest revolves around an obscure or “not hot yet” topic, you’ll get relatively few readers and relatively few link-traffic because you won’t be discovered easily by the Internet search engines.

However, by writing about the subjects that you already know a lot about you’ll generate many excellent articles.

The “keyword writer” would be struggling to find the exact words and proper facts to squeeze out yet another article on a hot-keyword topic that he feels nothing for in his heart.

But you, on the other hand, would be breezing through several of articles in a row in your own field since not only you’d be charged up and loving every word you write about that favorite topic of yours but you’d also enjoy the advantage of already knowing a lot about the subject matter and having the facts ready at your finger tips. Your favorite subjects will fill the sails of your enthusiasm with the fresh winds of inspiration.

For example, you might be a writer who does not have much to say about (let’s say) International Monetary Fund, a very important organization that nevertheless bores you to death. Given the fact that you’re not moved by the topic of IMF at all, your article would not move any readers either. Or you’d end up expending so much finite resources on the article that it would become an “unfinished symphony”.

Bet let’s say you love films and film awards and someone asks you to write an article about the story of Oscars. The result: you can probably write two or three great articles within a few hours. No issues there whatsoever.

Real interest and real enthusiasm keeps the doors of imagination and inspiration wide open. Articles with those qualities end up generating a lot of fresh traffic for your target URLs.

The idea is to select a method (either the keyword or the interest-focus) and stick with it.

I personally prefer the second method – writing about what you love the most. But if you can research well and write about new topics you can use the first method as well.

The worst is obvious – not to do any article marketing at all. Regardless of the method you adopt, do not neglect to launch your article marketing campaign right away TODAY!

But what if you are a “lone writer,” an independent contractor working out of your home office, or an employee who is asked to come up with a corporate design guideline?

Here are seven time-tested design recommendations culled from my 20 years of experience as a professional writer, page layout and information designer:

1) Keep it simple. Limit your design elements to the following components:

a) Title b) Product/Service photo or image c) Company logo d) Footer

2) The cover should include (if applicable) version or release number, as well as the document number.

3) Footer should include date of release, copyright and confidentiality (if any) information.

4) Leave as much white space as possible for the eyes to rest. Some technical writers ruin their cover by including too many photos, drawings and figures on tghe same page in order to create a “masterpiece”. Using only those colors pre-approved by your client will protect you against possible future objections.

5) Leave out your name unless specifically requested by the management or the client. Anonymity is a normal default condition in technical writing and communication. Technical writers, besides being paid well, also enjoy the feeling of helping others accomplish technical tasks at the cost of remaining anonymous.

6) If you have a lot of text and graphic elements on the cover page do not center them like most amateur designers do.

The natural sweep direction for the eye is from upper-left down towards bottom-right. A comfortable reading experience is guaranteed by placing your text and drawings along that diagonal.

HOWEVER, if you have just a little text and a single image, then it’s okay to center your page elements since there isn’t much to read and stress the eyes. But that’s a special case and not the rule.

7) Select three or four harmonious colors and limit yourself to those only. Don’t forget: if one image is enough to convey the main idea of a document, then don’t use two. If two are enough, then don’t use three, etc.

A technical document cover should never have ten or twelve colors unless it’s a document about colors.

Go with safe traditional tones even when your color palette is limited to only a few colors. Blood-red letters on a pitch black background might be a great color choice for a punk rock web site but that combination does poorly on the cover of a technical document.

But I wish there wasn’t anything else to technical documentation. The hardest part comes before one even sits down in front of a computer to type the first word.

The hardest part in documenting anything is organizing the information in a way that makes sense from the user’s point of view. Otherwise people would have no use for technical documents in their lives.

If, for example, you are documenting a software package, are you going to introduce installation first, configuration next, and operation the last?

Or are you perhaps going to present the information in terms of the sites where the software is installed?

If you are writing a manual about cats, are you going to introduce them according to their fur thickness?

Richard Saul Wurman, a legendary technical communicator who has written extensively about the issue, has introduced the LATCH method, an acronym made up of the first letters of the following 5 information organization principles:

1) Location
2) Alphabet
3) Time
4) Category
5) Hierarchy

Wurman claims that ANY INFORMATION can be categorized neatly along these 5 dimensions and he may be right about that. It’s a great tool to use when you are trying to decide how to make sense of any subject matter.

For example, if you’re writing a City Guide, you can of course use L (Location) easily and divide the guide into districts, neighborhoods, etc.

Once you do that, you can switch to T (Time) perhaps and talk about what is “old and historic” and what’s “brand new” in every location.

How about C (Category)? “Uphill” versus “Downhill”? Or “Electoral Districts” versus “Other Districts”?

As one can image, the options are numerous.

So the next time you need to organize information, start with LATCH categories to save time and energy.

And within the medical writing subset, regulatory writing is another specialty that pays very well since your employers are usually pharmaceutical companies that rarely have any cash problems.

Regulatory writers generate all the relevant documents required to secure approval for all new pharmaceuticals. The regulatory agency in the United States that oversees the whole approval process is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Technical writers who specialize in regulatory writing learn how to generate a specific set of specialized documents. Here are the two most important of them all:

IND (Investigational New Drug Application). Regulatory writers prepare this document in between the conclusion of the lab animals tests and the onset of the trial tests on human subjects. This document is a comprehensive one. It includes all available data on the chemical and molecular properties of the drug in question. In addition, it has to reflect the results of the tests conducted in the lab with test animals. All pharmaceutical companies operating in the U.S. market must submit an IND document to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Until the IND document is approved the drug company cannot market anything. Some companies sometimes go bankrupt when their drugs are not approved. Thus we hope the importance of the IND document is clear.

NDS (which stands for New Drug Application). This document reports the results of all clinical trials conducted on human subjects. Before the drug can be approved for the general market, the NDA document needs to be written well and convince the approval agency that the new drug is safe, delivers all the physiological, and pharmacological benefits it claims to deliver, and all that is based on sound and scientific laboratory data. Unless the regulatory writers prepare this document carefully, by answering all possible questions, the company can get hit by a massive lawsuit.

Regulatory writers prepare other important documents as well, like CTD (Common Technical Document) and MAA (Marketing Authorization Application).

If as a technical writer you have any leanings towards medicine, biomedicine, and pharmacology, I’d strongly encourage you to explore this lucrative niche for your future career.

Let’s say you’re given a Microsoft Word document and there are a lot of different paragraph styles in that document. What will you do when you are asked to right-indent all section headers AT THE SAME TIME by one tab stop and then to also change their colors to RED?

Find-and-Replace is a great functionality but we cannot use it here. You can use the search function to find a particular paragraph style but you need to use a search word or phrase to accomplish that. After you find all the headers that fit a certain paragraph style you’ll find out that you cannot select them all simultaneously for a global edit.

To locate all the headers in the Table of Contents and then select them all at the same time would be impossible.

There is a very easy method to accomplish that in a hurry.

First display the Styles and Formatting pane of your document by selecting Format > Styles and Formatting from your main menu.

From the list of paragraph styles, select one. There will be a dark blue box around it.

Hover your cursor over the style name to display the drop-down menu arrow.

Click the arrow to display the following options:

Select All X Instance(s)
Modify…
Delete…
Update to match the Selection

Select the “Select All X Instance(s)” option to highlight every piece of text in your document which has that paragraph style.

After that, go to your toolbar and click on the right-indent button. Your headers will shift to right by one tab space.

Go to your Toolbar; click the Font Color button and then select the RED color. All your headers will be converted to red.

And you are done! Congratulations.

You can do a much more thorough edit by again selecting all instances of a paragraph style.

But instead of changing the style through the tool-bar buttons, you can display the Modify Style dialog box by selecting “Modify” from the drop-down list of the paragraph style listed in the Styles and Formatting pane.

Every time that paragraph style is used it will display the changes you’ve made in that dialog box.

CAUTION: If you select the “Add to template” check box and then click OK, you’ll make the changes a permanent part of your style sheet.