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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I was tickled when I found this list of 12 words that should be banned in 2012 on PRDaily.com. What started in 1975 as a publicity ploy at Lake Superior State University in Michigan has turned into a phenomenon.

The List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness gets submissions from around the world. The word with the most nominations this year? AMAZING. It’s the first time the word has made the list.

Here’s a list of all 12 words (some of them are more than one word phrases) that made this year’s list, in order of the number of submissions they received:

• Amazing
• Baby bump
• Shared sacrifice
• Occupy
• Blowback
• Man cave
• The new normal
• Pet parents
• Win the future
• Trickeration
• Ginormous
• Thank you in advance

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Starting out as a freelance writer is not as easy as it appears. Learning how to become a freelance writer requires business considerations, not just writing chops.

Beyond getting out there and securing contracts, you need to be self-motivated and organized. This is a difficult transition, especially if you don’t have colleagues or friends who have been in the field and can help you along.

If you’re just starting out and hoping to make your livelihood writing, take a look at the seven tips below. Keep in mind that these are geared toward beginners who are pursuing freelance writing as a full-time job—not for those who simply do a little extra writing on nights and weekends. Continue Reading

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Freelancing, by definition, is a solitary existence. You probably sit at a computer most of the day, writing, designing, drawing, networking, and have little face to face interaction with peers who work in your industry.

I don’t know how you write, but I need it to be quiet to be productive. Deathly quiet. I have never been able to listen to music—even the classical stuff—while doing homework, working on a paper, or writing a magazine feature or blog post. If it’s rowdy outside my office, I shut the door, and people know not to bother me. When the phone rings, I groan unhappily. A ringing phone is my nemesis.

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One of my clients, for whom I regularly ghostwrite newsletter and trade journal articles, often drafts material and then sends it to me with a request “for a little wordsmithing.” Fortunately, he has learned that what he is really asking for is a writing consultation. Over the years, I have become his trusted ghostwriting resource (See From Temporary Help To “Trusted Ghostwriter” ) and I have acquired that status largely by going beyond “wordsmithing.”

Mechanical Fixes

Like many clients, when he first started working with me, he thought in terms of “fixing” and “improving” the fine points of his drafts, working at the word level of the material. He wanted me to:

• Fix grammatical problems or particularly striking style problems.
• Suggest a better word or phrase here and there, where he was groping for the right expression.
• Recommend edits to reduce the word count to what was needed for a particular publication, or for his newsletter.
• “Punch it up” a bit, which he thought of as using sexier words for the mundane language he started out with.

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I was recently asked to be a part of a panel of magazine editors to talk about how I like to receive queries from freelancers. There were nine magazines represented on this panel that ranged from having a press run of 12,000 to over 100,000. It included two nationally read publications, two regional magazines, one state-wide publication, as well as specific, niche publications dedicated to business, boating, and homes. I was pleasantly surprised that the query process was extraordinarily similar between us all.

I’m going to share with you the basic rules that all of us editors agreed on, in hopes your queries to the glossy mag of your choice doesn’t fall on deaf ears.

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Like corporate website, which use phrases like “innovative strategies” and “leading-edge solutions” ad naseum, many freelancers’ online portfolios tend to use some of the same tired phrases again and again. I combed through dozens of freelance websites (many of them discovered through FreelanceSwitch’s Find a Freelancer Directory) to create this list of over-used and ineffective phrases.

If you’re using these in your own portfolio, consider finding other phrases so you can stand out from the pool of eager freelancers. Continue Reading

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What you do not know — or pretend not to know — about your client’s business, product, or service can be one of your greatest assets as you help your client communicate with employees, investors, customers, or prospects. Even though you have been hired to write in your client’s voice, it can be a mistake to write completely within your client’s mindset.

You may be crafting an important address that a company executive will be delivering (live, printed, online, or recorded) to motivate employees to adopt new practices and adapt to new conditions. You might be introducing a new product or service to the sales force, with the hopes that they will be able to effectively communicate the benefits of the new offering to prospects and customers.

Whatever the specific task, very often the main challenge to delivering the message with impact is not the client’s lack of communication skills, but their failure to look at the message from the perspective of the audience.

The people whose messages are at the heart of the communication, whether top management, internal experts, or product team members, have been wrestling with the topic for so long that they begin to assume that key points, new directions, and essential elements that they have developed over a period of time will now be instantly obvious to anyone. Continue Reading

You’ve got a problem. What has started out as a straight forward design and development job has hit a sudden snag. While the client originally promised to take care of all their content, they’ve come to realize that it is actually pretty hard to write about their services. Now they’ve come to you to bail them out.

What do you do?

While you may initially think of running for the hills or waving your contract in the clients face, refusing to be involved in helping with a website’s content may be leaving money on the table. And while you may not think of yourself a great writer, eBook author Donna Spencer shows you how to get the job done in Rockable Press’ book, How to Write Great Copy for the Web.
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Whether you’re a designer, a developer, a writer, or any other type of creative professional, chances are that you’ll be writing on the Web at some point.

So, how should creatives stay consistent when writing online?

That depends on who you ask.

Most people and publications rely on the Associated Press Stylebook, but Yahoo is set to release its own version of writing guidelines, The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World. Continue Reading

The people who bring you these FreelanceSwitch articles work in a wide range of fields, and we hail from all over the world. But we do have something in common, and that is that we’ve found ways to squeeze writing about the business side of creativity into our busy schedules.

Finding time to write seems to be the Holy Grail for many would-be scribes. Well, I’m here to tell you that we all have the same amount of time: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And you might be pleasantly surprised to find that you’re already doing quite a bit of writing during your waking hours. For example:

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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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