I couldn’t help but chuckle at this recent story from The Boston Globe on the overuse of exclamation points.

Remember when email first came into prevalence? I do. Suddenly writing in all caps meant you were virtually yelling at someone. Typing made it easier to EMPHASIZE YOUR WORDS in a way that handwriting just couldn’t. With a quick touch of command + b, u, or i your words could be bolded, underlined, and italicized. Fancy!

Christopher Muther, the author of the piece I read in The Boston Globe, blames two men with the overuse of exclamation points in society today.

In 2008, they wrote a book called “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.” It created a minor sensation, partially because the authors condoned the use of exclamation points.

“ ‘I’ll see you at the conference,’ is a simple statement of fact,” they wrote. “ ‘I’ll see you at the conference!’ lets your fellow conferee know that you’re excited and pleased about the event.” –Christopher Muther

One Boston University psycholinguist quoted in the story says that exclamation points can “mitigate the brusqueness of a brief reply by indicating the writer’s enthusiasm, sincerity, surprise…”

I recently wrote a blog post on the perils of email communication where I was involved in a situation where my brief email replies were misconstrued as rude by the recipient. I wonder, now, if I had included a bunch of exclamation points, or, heaven forbid, smiley face emoticons, at the end of my sentences if they would have softened my message. I’ll never know.

I run a blog where I publish stories about weddings in Maine. Photographers submit photos of a particular wedding, and the bride fills out a questionnaire about their big day for their blog post. These questionnaires are consistently dripping in exclamation points.

I get it. Your wedding day is exciting! You’re marrying the man of your dreams! It really is a dream come true! But I omit most of these exclamation points in the blog posts because, well, all the excitement is kind of hard to swallow. Continue Reading

Writing effective blog posts isn’t as easy as you might think. There are a ton of things to take into consideration, including creating a catchy headline, the length of your piece, even the words that you choose.

I’ve spent some time scanning the Internet to find some useful tips on how to craft a great blog post from several different sources. Read on to gain insights from professional bloggers.

Be Focused

Focusing on one topic or piece of information will keep your blog post succinct and easy to read.

It happens to me too at times. I start out with a single topic in mind – but then the post morphs into something else. By the time I’ve finished, I’ve added another five different bullet points, talked about related problems – and suddenly my post is long and, well, rambly. —Write to Done

Giving your readers many options and topics will make them feel overwhelmed. Plus, a blog post that has too much information is too long! No one wants to spend 20 minutes reading a blog post.

Tackling just one topic or point per blog post makes your job easier, too. If you find that you are coming up with other ideas while you’re writing, jot them down and use them to craft a whole different blog post. Many shorter blog posts are better for your search engine optimization than one incredibly long one. Continue Reading

I remember sitting in a grad school course in journalism school listening to a twenty-something talk about how important blogging was going to become and how it’s changing the essence of journalism. I was so in disbelief as to what I was hearing that my chin was basically resting on my collarbone. THIS was the future of JOURNALISM?

That was almost 10 years ago. I got my master’s degree in journalism and I write for a slue of different publications—this blog being one of them.

At the beginning of this year, I was following the case of Crystal Cox, the “investigative blogger” who had been sued by the Obsidian Finance Group for defamation because she had blogged that the company had engaged in fraud. That’s a big accusation.

Initially, the blogosphere sounded the alarm at what seemed to be an attack by powerful moneyed interests on a crusading blogger. But a cursory investigation revealed that Ms. Cox employed a number of unorthodox tactics for a journalist, including registering dozens of domain names of people she perceived as her enemies in order to initiate serial and often profane salvos against them. —New York Times

She lost her case and was fined $2.5 million. According to U.S. District Court Judge, Marco A. Hernandez, Crystal Cox did not fit his definition of a journalist. Judge Hernandez’s qualifications to be a journalist are as follows:

• Education in journalism.
• Credentials or proof of affiliation with a recognized news entity.
• Proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest.
• Keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted.
• Mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his or her sources.
• Creation of an independent product, rather than assembling the writings and postings of others.
• Contacting “the other side” to get both sides of the story.

According to these guidelines, are you a journalist? Continue Reading

I had never heard of the freelance-writing online marketplace Contently until I stumbled across this piece of info from the Wall Street Journal:

Freelance-writing marketplace Contently has raised a $2 million Series A round led by Lightbank. Co-founder Shane Snow said he started the company to help resolve some of the business challenges–such as securing a string of new assignments and getting paid in a timely manner–common to many freelance writers. —wsj.com

What does this mean, exactly? Well, it means that Lightbank, a Chicago-based company that help create and fund early stage entrepreneurs, has given a sizeable chunk of venture capital money to an online community that supports freelancers. Lightbank is run by two guys who were the first two angel investors in Groupon. Guess they know a good thing when they see it.

Kinda cool, huh?

I decided to check more into this Contently company and see what it was all about. Their manifesto states, in a nutshell, that they believe in high quality content that is created by experienced journalists and writers, not blather cranked out by content farms. Continue Reading

I’m a writer. I like words. I also hate words. What people say in daily conversation rarely makes sense on paper. Using acronyms and emoticons are infuriating—especially to an editor.

Here’s an example: I teach undergraduate journalism courses at a couple of universities in the area. I once had a student hand write me a note and used a colon and parentheses to create a smiley face at the end of her letter. How did shorthand typing evolve into writing?

Another pet peeve of mine is when I get emails (usually from college students looking for an internship) using strange shorthand and emoticons. Talk about unprofessional!

I recently wrote a post listing words that should be banned in 2012. I’ve found en even better list on PR Daily by Arik Hanson on 28 shorthand words to eliminate from our lexicon forever. I had to share—and add my own two cents of course!

“29 terms we obvi need to totes elims from our lexi forevs.”

Did you understand that? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

I know we’re turning into a texting culture full of shortened and unintelligible words. But we’re destroying our language. At some point, we need to draw a line in the sand. Today’s the day. —PR Daily

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Engagement From Scratch! is a classic tale of learning from other peoples’ mistakes. Thirty professional bloggers prove that hindsight really is 20/20. And you can benefit from their advice thanks to Danny Iny.

I was pretty pumped that I was asked by FreelanceSwitch to preview this book. I had previously written a review for this site on Danny Iny’s online marketing course through his business, Firepole Marketing. I thought Iny’s product was really interesting and provided a lot of great tools, so I was interested to delve into Engagement From Scratch!

The premise is simple. Iny asked 30 bloggers from the very big (Brian Clark of copyblogger.com and Guy Kawasaki) to the up-and-coming (Onibalusi Bamidele from youngprepro.com) what they would do if they had to build a following all over again.

The overarching themes these bloggers shared were pretty straightforward, and nothing you probably don’t already know, such as:

• Be yourself.
• Comment on other blogs thoughtfully.
• Create great content.
• Know who your audience is.
• Find or create your niche.
• It’s not the size of your audience that matters, it’s how engaged they are.
• Write guest posts for other bloggers and have them write for you.

As I read through each essay, I’d nod my head, take some notes for this blog post, and read on. And I listened. I finally listened. Continue Reading

Nicole Ouellette’s journey from full-time employee to small business owner isn’t atypical of many other young entrepreneurs. But it’s her perseverance and success that makes for an interesting story.

Nicole, a native of Fort Kent, Maine (as far north as you can go without being in Quebec, Canada) was working at a weekly newspaper in Ellsworth, Maine, when the idea for her small business took root.

When she took the job as a web content editor, she took a huge pay cut. She started a blog about personal finance where she wrote about how she was learning to live on less money in September 2007. That blog, breakingeveninc.com, started out as a fun project and turned into something she really cared about. “I started caring that people were actually reading my blog,” Ouellette says. “That’s when I started marketing it and trying to find a way to publicize what I was doing.”

It wasn’t until someone came into her office at the paper and asked Ouellette to help her start her own blog—and told her she would pay her to do it—that Ouellette thought there might be a market for her skills. “No one in the small, coastal Maine community where I lived was doing what I did—helping small business owners learn how to blog, improve their search engine rank, and leverage social media to their advantage,” she says. Continue Reading

Credit: PriamLimited on Photodune

Maybe you are about to launch a blog or possibly considering how to focus your content to draw a specific customer. Content consumers – your customers – are looking for something when they come to your blog. Do you deliver? How do you know?

In this article we discuss techniques so you can gear your blog content to your target audience. With a solid plan and a little legwork, you can focus your content and capture a more pinpointed audience. To do this, you must follow six clear steps.

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Credit: feverpitch on Photodune

So you want to start a blog. You’ve decided on WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, or whatever, which is a good first step. Before you start blogging you need to think about how you’re going to differentiate your blog from the thousands of blogs out there in the blogosphere.

Many writers spend their day writing copy for their clients that isn’t particularly interesting to them—sometimes it’s downright boring. A blog allows them creative freedom to write about whatever they want. But sometimes, it’s that overwhelming freedom that dooms their blog from the start.

What you need to do is find your niche and blog about it. Creating a niche blog allows you to hone into your expertise, your passion, and write about it. As a freelancer, your blog should be another way to market yourself to potential clients. That doesn’t mean you can’t write about what you love—be it knitting, parenting, or shopping local—it just means you need to have a plan.

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Since the advent of the Internet as a wide-open information conduit there has been a lot of worry amongst legislators, media corporations, and others with a stake in preventing content piracy to create a law that would add teeth to copyright for electronic communications. The long discussions, lobbying, and heated arguments between interested parties were loud and public. The end result was the passing of a complex law called The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

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Photo by Extra Medium.

“Um… what did you mean here?”

Those words make every writer flinch, and every writer who gets feedback from others hears those words at some point. They can signal something as minor as a forgotten preposition or as major as having a section that doesn’t explain itself well. Once the problem’s pointed out to you, it’s as obvious as a huge red zit without concealer. How could you have possibly missed that?!

Easy. When you read it yourself, you read what you meant to say rather than what you actually wrote. Everybody does it. It’s unavoidable.

What you can do is minimize it.

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Photo by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL.

“Drat!” echoes in your mind. You’ve found superb sources for what you’re writing, chock-
full of information you would absolutely love to use. How do you paraphrase the
information?

First, why should you paraphrase? If you use someone’s information and its wording as if
it is your own, it is plagiarism. If you use someone else’s unique information and do not
credit it, it is plagiarism. Plagiarism is illegal. It also tends to have nasty side effects on your
reputation, be it for work or school.

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