NeoBluePanther

Writing, Among Other Things

Category: Writing (Page 12 of 19)

The "Elevator Pitch"

April 7, 2009 / / 3 Comments

“An elevator pitch is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (for example, thirty seconds or 100-150 words).” – Wikipedia

The first task of the “31 days to build a better blog challenge” is to write an elevator pitch for your blog. The idea of having an elevator pitch for your blog is a good one, because many a times people will come up to you and ask, ” What is your blog about?”

If you don’t have an effective answer to the question, then any interest the person might have had in your blog will vanish into thin air. And we definitely do not want that to happen. Do we?

I started this blog to replace my blogger blog. But, I did not realise that I had grown to love that blog, and even after starting this blog, I could not stop posting on that blog. So, now I had two blogs on my hands, and both had similar content. Something needed to be changed.

So, I decided that this blog was going to have a niche. After going through a list of things that I could blog about, I decided to use this blog to focus on writing, and related issues.

Thus, was born, the tag line of this blog : Writing, among Other Things.

This tag line  is also my elevator pitch.

What is your elevator pitch?

Does Twitter Make You a Better Writer?

April 3, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Twitter

Recently I was going through Brian Clark’s blog, and I came across an article with an interesting title: How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer. After going through the article, I was far from convinced  that Twitter can help you in improving your writing. In fact, not too many days ago, I was thinking that too much tweeting can actually hurt your writing.

Twitter gives you only 140 characters to say what is on your mind. With a 140 character limit, there is not a lot that you can say, even if you are trying to be concise. If you want to convey anything meaningful, you need more space than that. If you don’t have more space, what do you do: You try to find a shorter way to say what you have to say.

There are two ways in which you can do that.

The first way: Edit your tweet, change a few words, and try to be as concise as you can, but ensure all the while that you do not break the rules of proper English usage. If this attempt results in less than 140 characters, you are good to go, if not then you still have an unsolved problem on your hands.

The second way: Use chat lingo like u, gr8, dat, etc. Remove any extra words that may be grammatically correct, but are not needed to get the meaning across. In short, just type your message in any way that get the meaning gets across.  With SMS already being a part of our lives, this method comes naturally to most of us.

If you were tweeting to impress someone (maybe an editor, or a boss), you might want to take the first route. But, more often than not, Twitter is used as a platform for informal interaction, and playing by the rules is not that important. Therefore, most people choose the second way of making sure that their message does not cross 140 word limits.

As an example in the image above, I have taken one of my own tweets from not too long ago. At the time of tweeting that, I had no idea that I would be writing this post.

What do you think: Does Twitter make you a better writer or a worse one. Or, does it have no effect on your writing?

Use Kaizen to Improve your Writing

March 28, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Kaizen is a Japanese management concept that many companies have used to improve their processes greatly. Kaizen is a combination of two Chinese words – “Kai” meaning change, and “Zen” meaning good.The essence of Kaizen lies in the fact that it is a continuous improvement activity. Usually we learn things in fits and starts. Then, we try to implement the thing we have learnt, and keep repeating it, until another change happens.

This is true for writing too. Writing by its very nature is a continuous activity. If you are not doing it on a continual basis, you are not doing justice to your writing. But just being continuous is not enough. You have to ensure that what you have written today is, in some way, better than what you wrote yesterday.

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The Most Effective Tip for Writing Better!

March 12, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Writing BetterWhatever your profession might be, it is impossible that a single day goes by without you having to write something. Be it an e-mail, or a memo, or a report or anything else, but write you must.

This post is mostly about creative writing, but what is applicable to creative writing is, with a few necessary changes, applicable to any other form of writing.

The most common barrier to writing is the fear of making a mistake, or the fear of writing something that is boring, or unreadable. One just wants to sit on the desk, and start writing, with the hope that words will begin to tumble and an interesting, gripping, page-turning story will be born.

But, it is not that easy. Not even for professionals likes Stephen King and Jeffrey Archer.

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Feeling Guilty

March 3, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Feeling GuiltyStarting a blog, as the cliche goes, is like giving birth to a baby. You give birth to it, take care of it, help it bloom, and hope it grows into an independent youth who can take care of himself.

But, if at some point you neglect  the baby, there is a good chance that it might not grow up to be “normal”. The same thing happens with a blog.

And when you know that you have neglected your baby, you feel guilty. That is how I feel right now, because I think I have been neglecting this blog for a very long time. Oft and again I have tried to get back on track with the blog, and oft and again I have failed.

But as they say, failure is no reason to give up. If anything, it is a reason to try harder.

So, once again, I am going to try and get the blog back on track. Hope this time it stays on track!

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