Friday, October 30, 2009

7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School

7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School: "

image of a schoolboy


What is good writing?


Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They’ll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they’re really honest, they’ll admit it has a scholarly tone — prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could’ve been written by Willie Nelson scores a B (or worse).


Not all English teachers abide by this system, but the vast majority do. Just look at the writing of most graduates, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s proper, polite, and just polished enough not to embarrass anyone. Mission accomplished, as far as our schools are concerned.


But let me ask you something:


Is that really good writing?


I think most good writers listen to the way English teachers want them to write and think, “This isn’t real. It has no feeling, no distinctiveness, no oomph. You’re the only person in the world who would willingly read it. Everyone else would rather chew off their own eyelids than read more than three pages of this boring crap.” And they’re right.


Compare an award-winning essay to a best-selling novel, and you’ll notice that they are written in almost completely different languages. Some of it has to do with the audience, sure. It’s natural to write differently for academics than you would for everyday people. But my question is: who are you going to spend more time writing for?


My guess: everyday people — your family and friends, your blog audience, your boss at work, maybe even a Letter to the Editor every now and again. None of them are academics. None of them want to read an essay.


Personally, I think good writing doesn’t have to be educated or well supported or even grammatically correct. It does have to be interesting enough that other people want to read it. Much of what comes out of high schools and universities fails this test, not because our students are incapable of saying anything interesting, but because a well-meaning but flawed academic system has taught them a lot of bad habits.


Let’s go through some of them.


1. Trying to sound like dead people


It’s a sad state of affairs when the youngest writer on your reading list has been dead 100 years, but that’s the way it is in school.


I don’t know who exactly decides what’s worth reading and what’s not, but they (whoever “they” are) believe in reading the “classics,” and most of those classics are centuries old. What’s worse is that many teachers hold up the classics as examples of what good writing is, and they expect you to mimic those writers with your essays.


Sure, Chaucer and Thomas More and Shakespeare were the stud muffins of their day, but you don’t see them on the New York Times Bestseller List now.


Not because they aren’t good (they were freaking great), but because people can’t connect with them. By mimicking their style, you might make a few teachers happy, but you’re essentially handicapping your writing in the eyes of the public.


If you want to make a connection, you’re much better off studying the hot writers of today — like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Seth Godin. Watch what they do, and play with using some of their techniques in your own writing.


Yes, you’ll still be mimicking the work of another writer, but at least you’ll be mimicking something people want to read.


2. Expecting someone to hand you a writing prompt


Looking through the eyes of an educator, I can see why telling students what to write about would be useful. You have a bunch of students who couldn’t care less about your curriculum, and making them write a paper about the assigned readings is a great way to force them to read the material.


Makes sense . . . but it doesn’t make it any less damaging.


One of the biggest challenges of writing is figuring out what to write. Whether you’re writing a memo, an article, or a letter to your mother, the process is always the same: you start out with a blank page, and you decide what to put on it.


Sure, that involves considering what your audience will want to read, but no one but you makes the final decision of what to put on the page. That act of deciding is what writing is all about.


3. Writing long paragraphs


Once upon a time, it was acceptable to write paragraphs long enough to fill multiple pages with big blocks of text.


Not surprisingly, that’s the way most of us were taught to write: long paragraphs, topic sentences neatly organized, lots of supporting evidence in between assertions. It was the “correct” way to write.


Not.


Any.


More.


Nowadays, most paragraphs should be a maximum of three sentences. It’s also a good idea to include some shorter paragraphs with only one or two sentences, using them to punctuate powerful ideas.


It’s not so much about having a “correct” length as using paragraphs to give your writing rhythm.


4. Avoiding profanity at all costs


I admit it; this is a controversial one. Many excellent writers still hold that profanity has no place in a professional publication, while others curse like a lovable two-dollar, er, paid companion.


The rest of us sit around feeling uncomfortable and wondering whether it’s okay to express ourselves “that way” or not.


So who’s right? Well, I think Stephen King says it best:


Make yourself a promise right now that you’ll never use “emolument” when you mean “tip” and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean John stopped long enough to take a shit. If you believe “take a shit” would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say John stopped long enough to move his bowels (or perhaps John stopped long enough to “push”). I’m not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct.


‘Nough said.


5. Leaning on sources


Most kids I knew hated digging up sources and quoting them in their papers, but not me. No, the sneaky little bugger that I was (and still am), I realized that sources were an escape route from creativity. With enough quotations from other writers, I could fill up an entire paper without coming up with a single original thought of my own.


And I was rewarded for it. From kindergarten to getting my degree in English Literature, I got an A on all but like five papers.


Here’s why: a lot of teachers care more about solid research than original ideas. They don’t want to see daring and inventive arguments, challenging the foundation of everything we hold to be true and arguing boldly for a new worldview. To them, it’s much more important that you understand the ideas of others and be able to cite them in MLA format.


But real life is the opposite.


Go around citing the sources of all of your ideas and people will start avoiding you, because it’s boring as hell.


They don’t care who said what, and they aren’t interested in hearing the chronology of an idea. What they want to hear is a new perspective on a favorite topic.


If it comes from you, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too.


6. Staying detached


We are taught that good writing puts the focus on the subject, not the writer. It’s unemotional. It gives equal attention to opposing points of view, presenting them all without singling out one as best.


And sometimes, it’s true. If you’re a scientist, engineer, or a doctor, then maintaining your role as a detached observer is a great idea.


For everyone else though, it’s a disaster.


Have you ever read the stuff scientists, engineers, and other so-called “detached observers” write? It’s boring! Outside of their exclusive circles, you couldn’t pay people to read it.


If you want people to want to read what you write, then you should do the opposite. Be more like Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Gary Vaynerchuk. They are opinionated, have a unique style, and are prone to emotional outbursts.


It’s no coincidence. That’s what makes them interesting.


7. Listening to “authorities” more than yourself


Who am I to criticize the writing habits you learned in school?


Well . . . nobody.


Yes, I’m a professional writer. Yes, I have a literature degree. Yes, other writers have paid me up to $200 an hour to edit their work, and they’ve been amazed when all I did was correct the above mistakes.


But that doesn’t mean I’m right. In fact, that’s probably the most important lesson you can learn about writing:


No one but you is an authority on your writing.


Not me. Not your English teachers. Not Strunk and White and their highfalutin Elements of Style.


The longer you write, the more you’ll realize that other writers can’t tell you what to do. You should listen to more experienced writers, sure, but never more than you listen to yourself.


Great writers don’t learn how to write by sitting in writing courses, reading writing blogs, or browsing Barnes & Noble for yet more books on writing.


They learn how to write by coming to a blank page, writing something down, and then asking themselves if it works.


If it does, they keep it. If it doesn’t, they don’t. Then they repeat the process until they finish something they feel is worth publishing.


Sadly, most writers don’t know this


They labor under the mistaken assumption that there is an invisible standard of good and bad. And they worry that the Writing Police are going to show up at their door any minute, handcuff them, and haul them off to jail for failing to measure up.


If that was true, you wouldn’t see a single writer walking the street without one of those blinking bracelets around their ankle.


The truth is that you’re in charge. You. The blank page is sitting there, and you can fill it up with whatever the hell you want.


So stop sitting there, silly.


Go for it.


About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger and Cofounder of Partnering Profits. Get more from Jon on twitter.



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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2: "

VS_v_rgbLots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday.


I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish.


.NET 4


This is a big deal. This isn't '.NET 3.6' - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just 'pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed.' I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release.


Shouldn't every release be that way? Sure, and in this case there's a really clear focus on, as I like to say, 'making the Legos the right size.' This is as much about tightening screws as it is about adding new features.


There's more goodness that I can put in one post, but some personal favorite highlights are:



  • Quicker to Install - A smaller Client Profile with a much smaller initial download (down to 0.8 megs from 2.8) for bootstrapping .NET client apps faster than ever)
  • Side by Side - .NET 4 is a side-by-side release that doesn't auto-promote, meaning you won't break existing apps and you can have .NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4 apps on the same machine, happily.

    • Side-by-side CLR support for managed add-ins inside of apps like Explorer or Outlook. Again, new and existing apps in the same process, chillin'.
    • For more details on Application Compatibilty, check out the AppCompat Walkthrough for .NET 4 on MSDN.

  • Dynamic Language Support - The DLR (Dynamic language runtime) ships built-in with .NET 4 so you can mix-and-match your solutions and pick the best language (or languages) amongst C# and VB.NET as well as F#, IronPython and IronRuby. This includes better support for COM (yes, COM! People do use COM and it's even easier with the new dynamic keyword in C# these days.)
  • More Web Standards Support - Better support for WS-* and REST making interop easier. (I love ADO.NET Data Services, but you know that already, Dear Reader. I'm a bit of a RESTafarian, these days.)
  • Plugins Galore - Visual Studio 2010 uses MEF and WPF to enable a whole new world of clean managed extensions as well as an Online Gallery (there's an extension for that!)
  • Multi-Framework Multi-targeting - You can't really overestimate how useful this is, but a picture is worth a thousand words. You can code all your apps in all your organization's frameworks with the same IDE:
    WindowClipping (3)

Keep an eye on the blogs this week as the various teams talk about their favorite features.


On the ASP.NET 4 side:



Oh, yes, one other thing…


Fresh Look



SplashScreen


WindowClipping


You may notice a few things in the new Splash Screen above. There's a new Visual Studio logo that goes nicely as well as a new logo for MSDN. You probably heard that we launched a new MSDN this weekend and today we add the new logo and background. This new MSDN is the beginning of a more agile, community focused MSDN and you should expect to see and hear of cool stuff coming from the team, often, in the months to come. Of note will be the new MSDN Lightweight view, soon to be the default view for the library.


In the coming weeks I'll dig into more details on the these new things and how they work together:



  • Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
  • Windows 7
  • Microsoft Developer Network

Enjoy! Also, be sure to check out Soma's blog post and go get Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 as soon as you can!



© 2009 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.



"

Chrome OS Now Available, Go Get It [Chrome]

Chrome OS Now Available, Go Get It [Chrome]: "

This one came out of nowhere. Chrome OS is now available for download. It's not the final version, but a beta.

2009-10-21: New Chrome OS 0.4.223 beta is available now!

Chrome OS is a brand new free operating system built around the revolutionary Google Chrome browser.

The project aim is to provide a lightweight Linux distribution for the best web browsing experience.

Featured software in Chrome OS:
GNOME 2.24 desktop environment
Google Chrome 4.0.223 web browser
Google Picasa 2.7 photo manager New!
OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite
GIMP 2.6 image editor
Flash Player 10.0 plugin
and much more!

System requirements of Chrome OS:
Processor: Intel Pentium, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer
RAM: min. 256 MB
Hard disk: min. 1 GB
Graphics card: supports most modern graphics cards

[Google]






"

Top Sites for Free eBooks

Top Sites for Free eBooks: "

amazon_kindle_2eBooks are becoming more and more popular these days and Crenk just wanted to let you know the best places on the web to find eBooks.


eBook Search Engines


www.pdfgeni.com

www.pdf-search-engine.com

www.data-sheet.net


Scribd.com


Scribd is basically the YouTube of documents. They have a great library of free ebooks to choose from.


Free Ebooks For Your iPod, PDA, Smartphone, Blackberry etc.


www.gutenberg.org

www.manybooks.net

www.feedbooks.com

www.booksinmyphone.com


Free Tech eBooks


www.freecomputerbooks.com

www.freetechbooks.com

"

Verizon

Verizon’s Motorola Droid Demo [VIDEO]

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