Writing: The Habits of Highly Successful Writers

The Habits of Highly Successful Writers

Written by Stephanie Cage

Have you ever envied those hugely productive writers? You know repparttar

ones I mean. The article writers whose names crop up with boring regularity in all repparttar 128740

trade magazines, and who still find time to keep their web sites up to date with masses of credentials and edit a couple of house journals. The short story writers and poets whose names crop up in all repparttar 128741

competition shortlists and magazines – and they’ve probably published an e-book and are teaching half a dozen classes too. And worst of all, repparttar 128742

25-year-old novelists whose books take up half a shelf in your local bookstore!

If you’re anything like me, once you’ve done burning up with envy, they prompt you to resolve to change your attitude, to write more and send more out. Of course, if you’re anything like I was until recently, your resolution lasted until you got up repparttar 128743 next morning… or if you were having a really good day, maybe until lunch.

The trouble is, you can resolve to change your behaviour all you like, but until you change repparttar 128744 underlying attitudes that cause you to behave that way, it’s going to be an uphill struggle.

Most writers who aren’t writing and submitting as much as they’d like to give one of two reasons.

The first reason is ‘I don’t have time.’

There are times in your life when that will probably be true. If you’re nursing sick kids, making a major job change or moving house, give yourself a break. There are other things to life besides writing, and when things calm down and you can give your full attention to repparttar 128745 page again, repparttar 128746 odds are your writing will improve for having some new experiences.

If you’re not going through a major life change, then time is not much of an excuse. You have twenty-four hours a day, repparttar 128747 same as repparttar 128748 rest of us. If you’re finding time for other leisure activities – TV, sport or socialising - then you have time to write. Successful writers find time to write. Rumour has it that best-selling author Carole Matthews produced her first book by tying herself to her desk when she got in from work and not undoing repparttar 128749 knot until she’d reached her word-count for repparttar 128750 day!

On hearing stories like this, most writers move on to repparttar 128751 second reason: ‘I wish I could do that, but I just don’t have that kind of motivation.’ In its extreme form, this can also show up as beating yourself up for being apathetic, lazy, or procrastinating. Don’t do it! Firstly, because it makes you feel lousy. Secondly, for most people, it has no useful effect at all. And thirdly, because it’s not true. You wouldn’t be here reading this if you weren’t motivated to write, and be repparttar 128752 most successful writer you can be.

The Value of Adding Images to Technical Documentation

Written by V. Berba Velasco Jr., Ph.D.

It’s cliché, but true—a picture does paint a thousand words. This is an important message to remember when writing any sort of user documentation, such as an installation guide or an instruction manual. A document that makes judicious use of images and diagrams will be much easier to understand than one that is composed entirely of text descriptions.

I observed this first-hand years ago, when a junior programmer at one company was asked to update repparttar software installation manual for their machine controllers. One of repparttar 128737 first things he did was to strip away all repparttar 128738 screen capture images, reducing repparttar 128739 entire document to plain text. “These images are just silly!” he said. “They take up space, and they’re just not necessary. I trust that anyone who reads this document will be smart enough to figure it out.”

This turned out to be a huge mistake. The technicians who had to use repparttar 128740 manual had a difficult time making sense of its instructions. They had to repeatedly ask for clarification, and one of them told me that repparttar 128741 pure text descriptions were just too cumbersome to follow. They were fearful of using these instructions at all, knowing that a single misstep could lock repparttar 128742 controllers into an irrecoverable state. It was a ugly situation all around.

The problem was that this programmer didn’t try to make things easy for repparttar 128743 users. For one thing, he failed to consider that some technicians were not native English speakers, and that they might struggle with repparttar 128744 wording. More importantly though, this programmer expected too much from his audience. He wanted to reduce these instructions to their bare essentials, thinking that would be adequate. He failed to consider that even an intelligent, otherwise careful reader might be tempted to jump over instructions, or would gloss over some critical detail. This is a common pitfall when time is short, and when repparttar 128745 users are confronted with pages and pages of bland text.

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