Tag Archives: writing

By Julie Blaustein

Have you ever just completed writing a blog post that you are wicked excited to share with the blogosphere, only to hit “publish” and upon reviewing it, discover that it’s a disaster? You find spelling and grammatical errors, and it just doesn’t flow. No doubt you have had that experience at some point in your blogging life.

I am excited to introduce you to The Universal Desk, a copy desk for the rest of the internet — all those bloggers out there who are working on their craft one blog post at a time. Every professional news writer has a hidden team of editors and copy editors that make them shine. The Universal Desk is staffed by copy editors who have worked for Random House, the International Herald Tribune and CNET, among others. They offer fast, professional editing for marketers, companies and students.

The idea for the site grew out of Ryan Singel’s experiences as a writer for Wired.com, where he had a front-row seat to the online publishing revolution. As a professional writer, he’s saved on a weekly, if not daily basis, by having editors tweak and improve his words, including catching embarrassing factual errors and unclear sentences.

Blogging software has put a printing press in the hands of anyone who wants one, democratizing the world of publishing — up to a point. The Universal Desk is meant to bring the power of a newspaper’s copy desk to anyone on the internet, whether they are a blogger, a marketer or a company. Copy editing is not just for professional news writers any more. They also handle heavier editing — such as in-depth tweaks and re-workings of marketing campaigns, press releases or websites. Their slogan is, “Everyone Needs an Editor.”

Check this out! The Universal Desk is offering 30 Bub.blicio.us readers a 1,000 words of copy editing and light editing free for a limited time until October 31st. for small start-ups and freelancers. All you have to do is contact Ryan at ryan@theuniversaldesk.com and say you saw this offer here. You will be provided credit in an account tied to your e-mail address, and you have three months to redeem it. Other businesses can try Universal Desk free for up to 500 words, for a limited time.

A book may not be the first thing that comes to mind when discussing innovation but as technology has progressed, the way we consume the information presented in books has made a steady evolution. From the audio book to the Kindle, technology has jumped in to make books easier to consume in a variety of formats creating a debatably richer experience.

New to the market is Vook. It is the latest innovation in reading that brings together books, video and the Internet. Vooks are available on the web and to download on a mobile phone. It’s an interesting idea with the goal of supplementing books with video and social content that aren’t available in the static format.

The web-based version allow for the reader to view the text of the book in a similar format to an e-Reader. Video is incorporated on the side of the screen so you can easily view complementary material without flipping between screens or from book to computer. It also includes social media capabilities by integrating with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The mobile format has similar features but due to the size of the screen, readers are directed to video rather than it being incorporated in the screen. Although I have yet to try it, I imagine this is incredibly useful for cookbooks and fitness materials more so than novels.

The book selection is on the smaller side and focused on fitness and cooking texts but the site is new and I expect their library to grow. I do wonder if they will attempt to turn some of the classics into Vooks, which could be very interesting to see.

Image Credit: incurable_hippie (via Creative Commons)

This is small news, but I was amused by it. The AP Style Guide, which is a style bible for many people in journalism (or writing in general), announced several updates today.

Among those updates was Twitter. I suppose it is being referenced enough in the news now that it needed to be called out. According to Online Media Daily,

The guide notes that the microblogging service limits messages to short Tweets. The verb forms are “to Twitter” or “to Tweet.”

They go on to note that the AP Guide has also added entries for text: “to text,” “texted” and “texting.”

Considering that I often refer to either the AP Style Guide or the Microsoft Manual of Style (for tech writing), I’m amused these things are being settled.

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The blog is now an old entity in the new Internet, the one that is forever evolving and moving forward at breakneck speed. We’re about to see the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the search engine that promises to search the Internet with a brain and offer results that are useful at first glance, unlike the huge lists we have to trawl through to find a semblance of what we’re looking for in the first place. But there’s a reason why the humble blog is still relevant in any setting, be it the present or the future, and that’s because it exists solely for the reader.

A blog is an outpouring of ideas and information that exists to satisfy two needs – the need to express in a blog writer, and the need for information and recreation in a reader. There are various reasons why people read blogs – some of them may search for one blog in particular because they know the author, others may stumble upon one in a random search operation and subscribe to its RSS feed after finding it to their liking, and yet others may be looking for certain information which they find to be factually correct and aesthetically presented in a particular blog. But there are probably just a handful of reasons for people to dislike blogs and shun them – because they are not interesting and because they have been written badly.

While it’s hard to make yourself interesting to a virtually unknown reader or capture the attention of all the people who stop by your blog, you can do something to improve the quality of the content on your blog. Good writing is important to draw repeat visitors because:

- People prefer information that is presented clearly and concisely.

- They are turned off by explicit grammatical and semantic mistakes.

- The quality of the content you provide is diluted if the language you use is not up to scratch.

- Spelling and grammatical mistakes can have disastrous consequences if they are misunderstood.

- If you fill your page with keywords just so you gain a higher ranking on Google and its ilk,
you’re not going to have any repeat visitors.

- Your content must be what the reader is looking for (according to their searches) or they’re likely to feel cheated.

- Your content must be easy to browse through and read at a glance.

If your blog is not doing as well as you expect it to, perhaps it’s time to go back and check the basics. Rather than spend time on the fancy accessories like page design and font selection, rather than obsess over the ads you want to place on your page, it’s best to conduct an analysis of your writing and try to inject the qualities that it lacks. Because, when it boils down to it, a blog is just the power of the written word.

This post was contributed by Kimberly Peterson, who writes about the health care administration. She welcomes your feedback at KimPeterson2006 at gmail.com